THE QUICK FIX

A current piece of common sense says that the way I think causes my worries and upsets. My feelings are simply a reaction to the way I interpret a situation. In certain situations I habitually react with the same negative ideas; my thinking habits are what upset me.

If the thought actually produces bad feelings, the obvious thing to concentrate on would be the way I think. I can achieve a quick fix for this through hypnosis or operant conditioning. The flavour of the month is called: Solution Focused Brief Therapy – the ultimate quick fix, as easy as a pill and very popular just now.

This way of looking at our psychology is something a trap because although it seems as though the thought causes the feeling, it’s really the other way round. The thinking seems to come first because it is the first signal that gets through to me that something is wrong. I am numb to my whole physical-emotional response to a situation; so the first thing I am aware of is the effect on my thoughts. The thoughts are first, so it seem, and are therefore the source of the trouble.

Since I live mostly in my head I am only aware of my emotions when they are screaming at me and I can’t ignore them. Most of the time I am numb to my feeling and just think about things.  Let’s be simple and clear: when we say ‘thoughts’ we mean what I going on in your head; when we say ‘feeling’ we mean the emotion and motion in your body.

 Psychologically, thoughts are just the tip of the iceberg – useful only to discover what I have been feeling. Pure thought does have its uses, but not in the realm of self-discovery. But I am so used to living in my head that I have to be taught, coached somehow, to pay attention to what’s going on below the brain-box.

The head is solution-focused, regarding everything as a mechanical problem with causal connections. You have a problem; you find out what’s wrong and fix it; just like a problem with a car. The only test of your judgment is the immediate outcome. Immediate visible outcome is the only criteria: has the problem been fixed or not. Same with relational problems: not whether I am wiser, but whether everything behaves better. And I am better, but at the expense of a more anesthetised body. What this solution-focused method misses is that the body is the location of the unconscious and it is this that drives most of our relational difficulties. Like the following:

“My wife doesn’t trust me because I once had an affair.” That’s the problem. Solution: I must be more trustworthy and I must show her I am.   Right ?

Wrong.

My basic problem has nothing to do with trustworthiness, although it seems so. Worse still, I am operating on my wife’s idea of what the problem is; I am fixed, not only in my head, but in hers. I accept what she says because she is usually right about these sort of things. Also, I know she needs to be accepted; I understand what she says and I want the best for her. I am hooked on looking after her, so that she will look after me. And this little-boy dependency on ‘my mum’ colours my whole relationship with my wife and causes many more problems than just this one. But all this is unconscious, out of the range of my awareness. By deciding in advance what the problem is, and what the solution is, I limit the range of my awareness and exclude the complex of feelings and intentions that are really driving me.

I am not saying that my childish dependencies are a bad thing. In fact, they are an unavoidable and necessary part of any relationship. The strength of my dependency is not the point, but whether I am aware of it, whether I pretend a false maturity and complete self-sufficiency. It is the pretence that causes the trouble. This subterfuge confines my child to the unconscious and distorts and confuses my relationships. I live a lie, pretending to be something I am not.

By not allowing for unconscious factors, a solution-based therapy assumes that I am grown up and that my goals reflect my true self. This will keep me confined to my pretences and limit the growth of my awareness. What is also out of range of my awareness is that the intensity my wife’s concern with trust has roots in her childhood – and this is her problem, not mine. She projects this problem on to me; I buy it and my goal is then to make myself better.

That negative outcomes to my problems are caused by my fixed thinking is a tempting theory and you can certainly change behaviour using behavioural techniques; but we want more than to simply change behaviour. We are not training dogs or dolphins. Human psychotherapy should have a deeper purpose than this. And surely this would be to ripen my sense of soul and broaden awareness of the deeper reaches, not simply of visible problems, but of my imagination, emotional being and the hidden unsuspected connections with my past.

Setting goals for therapy keeps me to the subject, stops me from wandering in my account of myself. But it is precisely in wandering, in the off hand remark, the unimportant slip, the unguarded moment, that the gold lies. In psychoanalysis this is exactly what was encouraged. It was called ‘free association’. The so-called patient ‘talks of the things that trouble him as freely as he is able and begins to understand the ingenuities of the censorship he imposes on himself… What is said as aside from the matter in hand, what is said ‘off topic’ is where the action of meaning and feeling is’. ¹

Rather than set what goals should be achieved, the essence of therapy is that we have no idea what will open up, what will happen or where it will lead. I have some idea of what is bothering me. And this is where we start from, but no one can say in advance what will emerge.

Of course I can have no idea of what will happen. Of course I can’t say, because what needs to happen is unknown. I don’t even know. No one can – and certainly not my therapist.  That’s why conscious goals are so limiting; moreover, they usually turn out to be someone else’s goals or what ‘society’ says. Such conformity imposes an unnatural restriction and leaves no room for the unexpected and potential aspects of my individuality. Merely considering relationships, our emotional intelligence is far more competent at working out these complex problems than the top office. But we have to get out of the CEO’s chair in the executive suite and follow an inward sense that we will find is excited and uncertain about what may come.

^{1  Phillips, Adam. Side Effect. Penguin Books, 2006}