REPETITION

Happiness is the longing for repetition. Milan Kundera

Repetitive behaviour has always been a bit of a worry. Freud worried about the way veterans repeatedly re-experience shell-shock traumas long after the battle. Then there’s the way people repeat failures, like hooking up with the same unsuitable type of partner time after time; or small things, like always misspelling the same a word, or always forgetting that particular person’s name.

Yet when you think about it, most of our lives are repetitious: the same habits year after year; the same breakfast cereal; same friends; same time to bed; same workspace; the same face looking back at me in the mirror; the same daily grind, the same pleasures, over and over. There are, of course, disruptions like the occasional earthquake, but we try to get back to the familiar as soon as possible. Occasional variations are OK – but not too much!

It’s not surprising, though, when you realise that repetition (or replication, as they call it in biology) is the basis of all life. The exact duplication of the DNA molecule each time a cell divides is a miracle. Without it life on earth would not exist.

It seems like it’s only in the context of repetition that useful change happens. It’s the slight variation in DNA, a minute variation from exact duplication, as it is passed from the parents to the child, that’s the basis of evolutionary change. And in therapy it’s the cumulative effect of small changes that count, always in the context of reiteration.

What got me to think about all this is how we look upon repetition in therapy; I mean the way we do therapy. The client has an hour a week for an indeterminate period. But how do you decide when therapy is finished. Freud worried about this too and wrote a paper called: Analysis Terminable and Interminable. There’s no simple answer, but I think we can gain a glimmer of light by looking at the nature of repetition in another kind of therapeutic endevour.

Let’s take a long standing and reputable method like meditation. In its present-day secular form, known as Mindfulness, it has gained a lot of medical and scientific recognition. It works. But how long should you do it. An hour a day? Five minutes a day? Once a week? For a month, a year, a lifetime? Repetition of some kind seems to be necessary. To me, one thing is fairly clear: a little and often is better than a lot seldom.

The main problem with meditation is how to keep going. In a monastic setting or on a ten days retreat, keeping going is decided in advance. After all, doing meditation is why you went there. Keeping going might be difficult, but you do it. It’s when you are home again and in your usual surroundings that meditating for an hour a day is more onerous. Of course, you can do it, but you don’t. And the reason you don’t or can’t is because you are asking too much of yourself. The process has to be adjusted to the limitations of your actual life-style. Otherwise, trying to do too much ends up with doing nothing. On the other hand, a little and often gives you something you can do without strain: ten minutes a day is about right.

I’ve been working on a slightly different form of meditation which I’ve called ‘Bodyminding’. It owes something to focusing and something to traditional meditation. I’ve discovered that it’s very important to limit the amount of time you spend doing it, otherwise it locks into something you should do. As soon as this happens the practice gets on the wrong side. The practice period becomes an opponent that requires something of you; and before you know where you are a resistance develops which only gets stronger the more you persist.

You have to be very strict with the time. You finish dead on ten minutes. And there must be no suggestion that the meditative state is how you should live your life – contrary to Ancient and Modern Spiritual Idealists. The ten minutes must be separate and special; otherwise everything gets conflated and mixed up. In order to work it has to be a time that’s special, something you look forward to – otherwise it is useless.

And this is where it gives us a window on counselling and therapy. In the same way, the therapy session has to be special, separate and distinct from usual life; and it has to be something you look forward to. As with meditation it is repetitious: same day of the week; always for one hour, same therapist, same room, same process, same appointment time.

This limitation is a great advantage. It creates a special ‘mental set’ every time you walk in the therapy room. Within the compass of that ‘set’ insights happen that would never occur to you in the outside world. This ‘mental set’ builds up slowly over time. The therapy room becomes a place where something different happens. That’s part of the enjoyment. Mental sets are have a powerful suggestive effect and can change your whole psychological state – like stepping into another country. It’s as though the therapy room, the setting, takes on a special ambience. It becomes more than just what you do in the room, but rather all that’s happened for you in that room builds up into this slightly other-worldly home, like walking through the looking-glass. I have known people who stopped therapy simply because I changed my consulting room. It is a powerful phenomenon I’ve never seen discussed in psychological literature.

So far as the duration of therapy is concerned, I have to completely disagree with the way this is managed in most counselling agencies. In the classical days of psychoanalysis the duration of therapy was measured years rather than weeks. But all that is out of date now, and modern counselling agencies are obsessed with ‘goals’, ‘throughput’ and ‘outcomes’, achieved in the minimum time, all annotated in reports, forms and clinical reviews; very satisfying for the administration, no doubt. Administrators love paper. Not the client, but the paper work is what counts. Who for? Why the government ministry that supplies the funding, of course. In the midst of all this paper work the client, the person it’s supposed to be about, is lost. In truth, the forms and details, pretending to be helpful, are a vast distraction. For me, they are so unimportant I sometimes forget to get the clients telephone number. As for therapy goals – I never ask. It’s a red herring. I want to know how the person is now.

How long should therapy last? What are the real criteria? The most important one is, again, it has to be a time you look forward to. Not in the sense that you hope it will do you good eventually. That’s OK, but it’s not the crucial factor. The only thing that counts is the enjoyment derived from the process itself, the pleasure of having a place where you can unfold yourself. If you enjoy it, it’s doing you good. Other factors may determine when therapy ends, but in my experience the more successful therapy is, the longer it can go on with benefit. There are no rules; and certainly no arbitrary time limits.

In any kind of serious relationship real intimacy can only be achieved through repeated cycles of connection. Intimacy between two people is a quality that develops. Intimacy is cumulative. For example, first whirlwind of being in love is, perhaps, not real intimacy because you only know a fraction of the other’s personality. It takes being with them in all kinds of interactions, all the many moods that arise, all the complexities that the relationship evokes – and that takes time. Lots of times.

One difficult problem in life is when too many bad things have happened that must not happen again. Too many losses, too many failures, too many humiliations, too many disappointments. Repetition becomes a threat. Then, when things start to ‘happen again’ the feeling of repetition provokes a kind of anxious boredom. The search for something new takes on a driving compulsion. Certainly, a life based on the avoidance of boredom is no way to go. The constant effort to escape repetition can drive you crazy.

And to end with, that mad and provocative philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence… Would you curse the demon or crave nothing more fervently?”

In spite of my advocacy of repetition I have to admit I can’t get my head around that one !! Moreover, I know many people for whom such an idea would be the worst nightmare they could imagine and who would curse the demon.