More Conferences

I have also just been chosen to give a paper at the ANZAP Conference, 2015. 

This is the peak-body for psychotherapy in Australasia, and I am pleased to be a member.

To enquire about booking a psychotherapy session please contact me on my email or mobile 0424 605 812.

I'm very proud and honoured to say that my paper 'Affect, authenticity and analogical relatedness: Exploring Heidegger’s eigentlichkeit and the Conversational Model of psychodynamic psychotherapy' has just been accepted for the Australasian Association of Philosophy's annual conference in June. 

http://www.aap-conferences.org.au

To enquire about booking a psychotherapy session please contact me on my email or mobile 0424 605 812.

Dr Cornell West on philosophy, jazz, blues and religion.

To enquire about booking a psychotherapy session please contact me on my email or mobile 0424 605 812.

The Masks We Wear

We all wear masks. 

Our true feelings are often hidden from others in order to maintain relationships. Most people have had the experience of a certain amount of self-censoring, not really allowing our true thoughts, feelings and desires from showing. Often we will be offer the world a slightly different identity dependant on the situation we find ourselves in. We are different in how we present ourselves with our partner, our children, our colleagues, our friends.

From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense. If we always told the absolute truth the fabric of our society would break down. Humans are social by nature and truths are challenging. Adaptability is one of humanity's great strengths and social adaptability no less so. 

Many people experience the mask as a momentary process, donned to negotiate a tricky social situation. In challenging or prolonged scenarios the wearing of a mask can lead to a feeling of being dishonest, disingenuous or misleading. However, we can usually return to our usual selves when the social situation ends and we can be ourself.

However, for some people this mask becomes much more permanent and insidious. The mask has become so common that they loose a connection with themselves, their true identity and self. This results is a painful feeling of being stuck and lost. It can lead to chronic feelings of emptiness, sadness and fear.

The loss of connection to ourself is often the result of trauma. Trauma can cause us to negate our own needs in order to accommodate the needs of others. This occurs in order to avoid being abandoned or harmed by those around us. In this way the self is negated and fragmented. Our own needs become so far from us we lose any connection to them and are left only with the mask.

William James

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist. Amongst his many achievements he coined the phrase 'stream of consciousness'.  He proposed that human selfhood is comprised of two elements, that he called the 'I' and the 'Me'. The 'Me' is our identity, what James call the Empirical Self. It is the things we do: Our social circle, our occupation, our hobbies, material possessions, spirituality, likes and dislikes. James argues that the 'Me' can be dynamic.For example, most people do not dress in the same way at 40 as they did at 14. Adolescence is a time of great tumult in the 'Me' as we try out different styles, groups, ideologies and priorities; different modes of being. Usually settling into something that becomes our identity (more or less).

The 'I' is the core self, it is a sense of being. The 'I' is the sense of continuity and constancy over time. It is our sense of individuality and distinctness from others.  The 'I' gives us agency and volition. It is the base on which the identity rests and depends, allowing the 'Me' to experiment and explore whilst never loosing it's way. Without this we are left with only stimulus, lacking context or meaning. 

Trauma disrupts this balance, 'I' and 'Me' become dissociated from each other,  and effects our ability to experience the core self. What is left is a sense of painful incoherence.

The way to reconnect the identity and the core self, the 'Me' and the 'I', is through the careful work of psychotherapy. The linking of the outer and inner experience allows the person to experience themselves more coherently. The knower and the known, the subject and the object. 

In this way trauma becomes metabolised and masks slip away, revealing the true-self within.

To enquire about booking a psychotherapy session please contact me on my email or mobile 0424 605 812.

RANZCP Congress

I have the pleasure of presenting to the Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatrists annual Congress in Brisbane on Tuesday.

My talk is about Existential authenticity in psychotherapy and how this is achieved through the Conversational Model's approach of preferencing affect and empathic attunement over interpretation through a meta-psychology.

The title of my talk is 'Affect, Authenticity and Analogical Relatedness: Exploring Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit and the Conversational Model'.

To enquire about booking a psychotherapy session please contact me on my email or mobile 0424 605 812.

Daniela Sieff on Emotional Trauma

Love and Radio: Split Brain

A neuroscientist talks us through her stroke, that left her with a left-brain deficit. She experienced profound empathy, bliss and connectedness to others, but was unable to read or understand language.

Visit the Talking Minds website or contact us to discuss making an appointment. I can be contacted directly on duncan.loasby.psychotherapy@gmail.com or 0424 605 812.

What is Madness?

What is Madness? from The RSA on Vimeo.

Visit the Talking Minds website or contact us to discuss making an appointment. I can be contacted directly on duncan.loasby.psychotherapy@gmail.com or 0424 605 812.

Reconsidering Psychotherapy.

A great summary of why psychotherapy is, was and will continue to be relevant. A vital form of treatment of mental illness and self improvement, whilst offering a crucial cultural contribution to humanity.

Visit the Talking Minds website or contact us to discuss making an appointment. I can be contacted directly on duncan.loasby.psychotherapy@gmail.com or 0424 605 812.

5 Myths about Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Myth 1: Tell Me About Your Mother…

In a session with a new patient at the very beginning of treatment, we were discussing their expectations of therapy and what therapy was. After a thoughtful pause they asked, “Are you going to ask me about my mother?”

Psychotherapy is all about relationships, how our patterns of relating define, limit and liberate us. Some of the most important relationships we have are with our families, so it makes sense that these are amongst the many things we will talk about in therapy.

Hollywood and the media portray psychotherapy in clichéd terms, in order to fit within the limitations of the film or TV medium. This often involves portraying therapists and patients as caricatures.

Clichés narrow the conversation, which, in turn, narrows our consciousness, or experience of being. The point of therapy is to expand our sense of ourselves, our consciousness. This is achieved through a special kind of conversation, where richness, expression and reverie are possible. This is the aim of therapy.

Myth 2: There’ll Be Long And Unbearable Silences

Sitting in silence used to be a standard part of therapy and analysis, particularly at the start of treatment. The therapist needed to allow the patient to start talking, in order to let the unconscious mind become free, and the patient would free-associate. This technique had a tendency to lead to long, and sometimes, unbearable silences, with the patient wondering what was going on. If the patient is insecure or has experienced trauma this can be a terrifying experience. It can cause them to feel fragmented and to dissociate, a feeling of what Russell Meares calls painful incoherence.

Having said that, silence most definitely has a place in therapy. Silence has a tone. Silence can be a time to sit with feelings, to reflect, to daydream or just be. It can also be a time of unbearable pain and difficulty. It is the therapist’s job to do their best to attune to the tone in the room and to enhance the creative and generative, and to reduce the impact of the destructive and painful.

Therapy doesn’t have to be masochistic. Generally, there seems to be a consensus that therapy has to be painful, trawling the deepest, most traumatic experiences and memories. Therapy can be painful, and those memories do get accessed, but if this is done within the holding relationship created by therapist and patient together, these traumas can be dissolved, and integrated into our conscious awareness.

Myth 3: It’ll Be Expensive

Therapy costs money, there’s no way around it. It is often a long-term project, but with long-term benefits, with progress made during therapy often remaining for many years after therapy ends¹.

Seeing a therapist with a Medicare provider number (for example a psychologist or mental health social worker) means the first few sessions are subsidised, but not necessarily free. In over 50% of treatments therapy goes on for much longer than the first 8 or 10 sessions². After the subsidised sessions are exhausted the patient pays the clinician’s full fee. Psychotherapists who do not have a Medicare provider number often work at a reduced fee, in the knowledge that the work is long term. This reduced fee often means seeing a psychotherapist could be cheaper in the long run.

Myth 4: There’s No Evidence That Psychotherapy Works

This is an age-old criticism of psychodynamic work and it is simply not true. This idea is borne of a time when psychotherapy was much more dogmatic and rejected the need for evidence. At the same time the rest of the therapy world became much more evidence-based in their practice, leading to the emergence of cognitive and behavioural models of therapy.

In the last 20 years, the psychodynamic psychotherapy community became aware of the need for evidence and have altered their approach, with many scientific studies and meta-analyses into the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy. The evidence for its efficacy is clear, psychodynamic psychotherapy is as effective as any other evidence-based therapy^3&4.

Myth 5: It’ll Be A Long Treatment

As I’ve previously said, psychotherapy is usually long term work. By the time people get to therapy they’ve often been feeling stuck, isolated and lost for decades; so it make sense that correcting this will take time. Evidence suggests that long-term work is most effective in dealing with complex and longstanding problems⁵.

However, this is not always the case. Psychodynamic psychotherapy has long advocated for the use of brief interventions⁶.  This kind of approach has now been adopted in the public sector, in a psychodynamically-informed therapy for people who are using self-harm to manage their distress. These patients are offered three sessions, with a forth education session for their relatives.

In the spirit of brief intervention I offer ‘Life Consults’. These are a longer, single sessions in which the client has the time to reflect and consider. It is an opportunity to try psychotherapy without stigma or commitment. This is a valuable opportunity for personal enhancement and growth, through deep consideration of our values and what really matter to us.

For more information about Psychodynamic Psychotherapy please watch this Ted Talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqm8fXFFHyY

Book a psychotherapy session:

Visit the Talking Minds website or contact us to discuss making an appointment. I can be contacted directly on duncan.loasby.psychotherapy@gmail.com or 0424 605 812.

1 Gaskin, C. (2012), The Effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy: A systematic review of recent international and Australian research. Melbourne: PACFA.

2 Littlefield, L. (Feb 2014). Seven years of Better Access Consumers show benefits from an effective, affordable and destigmatising mental health reform. Australian Psychological Society. Melbourne: The Australian Psychological Society Limited.

3 Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist 65(2): 98-109.

4 Leichsenring, F., Klein, S. (2014). Evidence for psychodynamic psychotherapy in specific mental disorders: a systematic review. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

5 Leichsenring, F., Rabung, S. (2011). Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy in complex mental disorders: Update of a meta-analysis. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 199(1): 15-22.

6 Barkham, M., & Hobson, R. F. (1989). Exploratory Therapy in Two-Plus-One Sessions II – A Single Case Study. British Journal of Psychotherapy , 6 (1), 89-100.

Winnicott

Visit the Talking Minds website or contact us to discuss making an appointment. I can be contacted directly on duncan.loasby.psychotherapy@gmail.com or 0424 605 812.

Heidegger in the Kitchen

Visit our website or contact us to discuss making an appointment. I can be contacted directly on duncan.loasby.psychotherapy@gmail.com or 0424 605 812.

What is our Authentic Self?

True And False Self, Owned And Unowned Being

Most of us, at some point in our lives feel that we are being inauthentic or not fully true to ourselves. Luckily, this has been an ongoing subject of exploration for psychotherapists and philosophers alike, so we have lots of interesting and insightful ideas to help us along our journey to a full experience of selfhood.

Donald Winnicott, the famous psychoanalyst, talked about true and false self in 1960. He talked about true-self being a sense of authenticity, spontaneity and realness. In contrast he described the false-self as being a place we retreat to in the face of trauma, where things appear real to the outside world, but never feel real to ourselves. Many people today experience this, at a time when appearances are paramount we neglect our inner lives, our inner selves, at our peril.

Winnicott

Winnicott was likely drawing from many years of work in philosophy into authentic being that has largely been associated with the Existential schools of thought. Existentialism has been linked with names such as Sartre, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. But one of the most important names in this traditional in Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Heidegger was a complex and contradictory man, who went on to completely dismiss any connection of his work to Existentialism. He was also arguably the most important philosophical thinker of the 20^thCentury. Heidegger’s work spoke directly to the question of authenticity. He said that authentic experience is that which is owned, that with is mine or yours. When in a state of inauthenticity we never feel like the experience is fully part of us. This often leaves us feeling uncanny or eerie, a state that Heidegger called Unheimlicht. This uncanniness leaves us with doubt, uncertainty and the feeling that things are not as they ought to be. This doubt creates a sense of unease, dread and anxiety, which unlike fear is not directed at a thing (snakes or the dentist for example), but is a pervasive sense of what Heidegger called Angst.

Heidegger

How Do We Find Our Authentic Self?

So how do we create a sense of authenticity in the face of Angst? The key appears to be to return to that which is most owned. Affect theory suggests that emotional states are innate, and we react to the emotional states of others even as newborns. In the Conversational Model we would state that these emotional states are wholly owned by us. In the practice of the Conversational Model the therapist is trying to deeply attune to the emotional states of their patient. In doing so they are engaging with them in a fundamentally authentic way, helping the patient to reconnect with their own emotions.

The inability to own our emotions and slip into a state of inauthentic uncanniness, much like Unheimlich, is called dissociation by psychotherapists. This is a subtle and oblique phenomena that has been identified clinically since the earliest days of psychotherapy. Dissociation is a fragmentation of our usual experience or ourselves, it feels like slipping away into what the psychotherapist Russell Meares calls a state of ‘painful incoherence’. A dissociated state is the ultimate un-owned experience, where our sense of ourselves becomes atomised, reduced and sheared off from normal experience. Dissociation is a common experience for people who have experienced emotional trauma.

As life becomes more and more hectic, often overwhelming, it is easy to become entrapped by the stimulus surrounding us and loose our connection to meaning, authenticity and ourselves. In typically impenetrable language Heidegger stated that ‘Discourse is existentially equiprimordial with state-of-mind and understanding’. Robert Hobson, the psychoanalyst stated much more elegantly ‘I can only find myself in and between me and my fellows in a human conversation’. In this Hobson is beautifully articulating the essence of what Heidegger is saying, that the essence of authenticity is found within our relationships to our fellows; within a human conversation.

Psychotherapy And The Authentic Self

The remedy for Unheimlich is the careful work of psychotherapy, with a therapist who can empathically engage you in the most authentic and meaningful way possible.

Talkingminds is a multidisciplinary practice where practitioners trained in psychotherapy can help you create a sense of authenticity. Visit our website or contact us to discuss making an appointment. I can be contacted directly on duncan.loasby.psychotherapy@gmail.com or 0424 605 812.

Further reading on the Authentic Self:

Forms of feeling, Robert Hobson 1985.

Heidegger for beginners, Lemay and Pitts, 2007.

Playing and Reality, Winnicott, 2005