Adrian Scott Counsellor Supervisor MBACP Accred

Silence in the therapy room is not in fashion at the moment. Strategies, courses, reading, exercises & self help is what the profession promotes. Rather than wait for something to emerge from a quiet silence of Free Association: doing is immediately more satisfying. Accompaniment with curiousity creating a deeper relational depth is too slow too inactive.

Ask counsellors in training they say they want to help. To rescue? But under a more detailed scrutiny it is our own pain of hopelessness and helplessness that we all want to avoid. We work like ships passing in the night. We want to rescue ourselves. But it is too hard and painful. So we try to rescue others.

The profession has evolved. The emphasis was firstly on own therapy, then supervision then training. Now with the industrialisation of the profession the emphasis is firstly on training, then supervision, then own therapy.
This is a reflection of the world. Quick on the click. Value for money. Action Thought Outcome. Rational measuring.

Andy Rogers says it better:
Don’t just do something: The vanishing art of sitting there in counselling & psychotherapy
through the music of Talk Talk and examples of different therapy approaches

https://www.andyrogerscounselling.com/therapy-blog/2024/12/09/dont-just-do-something-vanishing-art-sitting-there-counselling-psychotherapy

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2025
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
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John 22yrs old came to his first session with his mother. After an explanation that it would be better for him to attend the sessions without her: she went to the shops and picked him up at the end of the session.
Over the following weeks he came alone. He described his family where his father was an verbally abusive alcoholic, and his mother tried to protect him from his father. His Mother a saint. His Father a devil.

This idea of his family was fixed. John like Min in the previous case study was stuck. Stuckness is to be avoided. We run from it: or try to. Therapists try to fix, soothe, comfort rescue in the hope that someone like John will snap out of it.

Continuing on from the last blog Creative Indifference – The Fertile Void describes a Getsalt principle to create an opportuntiy in the clinical relationship. Something that comes into being: from the potential of emptiness. A new discovery of the self emerging out of nothing. The Void like a blank canvas is ready to be drawn on.

With John he repeated the same Parent narrative over and over. A coping strategy. A wall of defense concealing something behind. I asked him again to describe his family. Always returning to the same narrative. He turned to silence. There was nothing to say. But in the silence which is never neutral there was an emptiness, helplessness, & hopelessness. He started to come late – a precursor to not attending.

I asked him how therapy was going in the vain hope that he might be angry with the therapy or with me. But like his mother – I was the saint – to be protected. We went back to silence. I asked him if there was anything that was different about his life. He shrugged. I felt angry. Rejected. Useless. No impact. As an aside which I didn’t hear the first time he said that he had begun to feel annoyed with his mother. The balance of saint & devil had in that moment shifted.

Over the following months slowly a different narrative came out. Applying a stance of creative indifference through the idea of a Fertile Void John re-invented the parent story. His mother kept on going back to the Father against the pleading of her children not to. The Father had a kind intelligent persona when sober which he understood to be love. The mother a critical person dominated and controlled her children in fear of the Father with little love.

Our childhoods are not want they seem: but we want them to be. Rooted in a child’s perception of good/bad, black & white: understood & warmed in its simplicity. The simplicity soothes us of complexity, nuance and strong opposing feelings.
Our story is a coping strategy: which got us through. We survived.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
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Creative Indifference is a term in Gestalt Therapy to describe a state of unbiased awareness. Creative can mean the doing of something artistic: that comes from the heart not the head.
Here it means a familiarity: a yearning for emotional contact but not being able to connect.
What Freud called the “uncanny”. Something special in the ordinary.

“Uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”

This may occur when sitting with a person, paying attention, and they communicate something to you: which you can feel but is just out of reach. This psyche appears to work in layers. So conscious debris has to be pushed away to uncover what cannot be reached underneath. See this Case Study where no judgement is placed on missed sessions. Rather an attention to understanding what missing might mean.

Indifference here is not uncaring. But a neutral attention that carries no weight or prejudice. For example when you read the words “giver and taker” you immediately ascribe a positive value to giver and a negative value to taker. But nothing is so simple when we are taught/influenced. This indifference allows something in sense to come up detached from value, bias, prejudice so that it can emerge liberated from repression.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
Details changed for confidentiality

“I think therapy is making me depressed” Gia announced. Gia’s relationship has drifted away, and she is left abandoned, alone. Depressed. Whatever is thought about Klein and her depressive position there is a period of therapy usually about 18 months in when the mist lifts. Some cannot reach this point.

But Gia has. The point when she gets an inkling that all is not what it seems. The awareness dawns that she lives in repeats trying to soothe her pain. Even the intellectual noticing of these forces is dynamic. The real relationship is to maintain the aloneness that cannot be soothed. She cannot go back with this knowledge. She cannot go forward afraid of the new unknown.

Gia realised that the point of her relationships is to attract the gap and non-committed. She has done this a few times that the evidence becomes irrefutable. She begins to feel the loneliness and emptiness, rather than avoid – so that acting out these feelings in a relationship becomes less effective.

But her psyche has layers of defenses to protect her. It senses that she has made a part discovery of its inner workings. A breached defense. So her psyche tries to retreat further back into the shadows: the depression.

Not having interest in her work and friends Gia’s psyche creates a kind of cocoon in the hope that the old story will return. She has stopped going out, feels fatigued, and spends time in bed. The body has to recuperate. The psyche discovery has given the body a blow. The body shuts down when allowed – to try and recover.

One notable UK therapy organisation took pride in its data recording where the client’s feelings scores went down: noting a treatment success! Counter intuitively it can be that we have to get worse to get better. Like an old skin that is shed creating vulnerability. While we feel our way into a new skin. To emerge with a better more authentic breathable skin of protection.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
Details changed for confidentiality

The Democrats have lost again. Twice. For similar reasons.  
They missed: blinded by their own light.
In 2016 they missed the Deplorables. In 2024 the Working Class feeling poor.

Their outlook of fairness, reasonableness, with no discernable policies was projected into a loss. Like all groups of people we don’t learn from the repeat unless forced to. Like the Johari Window we can only see what we want to see because it is familiar. We are blind to difference, frightened by unknown values.

Democrats and their principles are founded on an educated elite which the majority of the American people feel excluded from. The frontier country wants something more dynamic. Of action. Not caring what that action might be.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” Anais Nin

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
Details changed for confidentiality

Apparently there are enough empty houses in the UK to satisfy the population without building anymore.
Many houses are empty because families cannot let go of them. They have sentimental value. They were brought up there, or thier mother died there etc.

It’s about Loss again. We all struggle with it. We have little help in a culture obsessed with youth, progress, & busyness. Yet how we cope with loss has a major impact on the quality of our lives. We can be stuck: unable to let go. Going round and around. Some actively keep the loss alive to try & keep its memory vivid and sharp.

According to social media objects are valueless and it’s relationships that hold meaning. It is more complicated.
As in the empty house example things or objects are symbolic. It might be obvious to some: but unknown to others. We hold onto people and relationships, dead or alive. More obvious for the dead relationships. But we keep symbolically present relationships worn by the reality of existence, by dreaming they are better relationships through objects. The money, heirlooms, jewellry, stocks, create the illusion of comfort & safety. The area we live in, the school we went to. The fanciful dreaming of what might have been, or could be.

In childhood we use objects to transition through difficult phases of development. And in adulthood. Cars, watches, same walks, & shops keep us in minor rituals so that we can be rooted/pegged to a life that has some meaning.
Perhaps like pets ….

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
Details changed for confidentiality

With trends like OK Boomer and Millennial Sensitivity the clashes between the generations continue.
As they always have. Generational characteristics form us particularly around our peer group. They are an intrinsic part of our early experience. We remain still but the ever moving culture changes behind us. This evolution creates an inevitable mismatch between our generation, and the generations before and after us.

In terms of feelings a revolution happened.
The silent generation traumatised by War brought up children without any notion of feeling. As though feelings didn’t exist. Stiff Upper Lip. Survival literally: fear of death literally was the experience. A shortage of shelter, food, luxuries creating a cold minimal attitude to life where peoples’ feelings were not counted.

The newer generations are more in touch with feelings, and have expectations that feelings are recognised and acted on. Brought up in a more peaceful time, with more opportunity to reflect on feelings. These generations are more motivated by feelings which previous generations cannot understand. Not their experience. So they criticise.

What will feelings be like for future generations ……

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

Play is an important part of child development. Play initiates a curiousity and enjoyment. A conerstone of a good therapy is the ability of the person to be playfully curious about themselves. And notice. To have learnt to play in safety gives a looseness, a spontaniety. A mocking playful sense of self as being odd, quirky, nonsensical, contradictory, absurd, ridiculous.

To explore yourself skeptically, from the viewpoint of an outsider with a playful curiousity, gains awareness of who you are, how you are, and your journey taken to this point now in the present.

If you have no experience of play as a child – then the reaction is to be tight. Scenarios have to be predicted to be made safe. Unplanned happenings are frightening and provoke fear anxiety. Self protection is the big driver blocking off play and creativity. Adults are lucky to play. Most have an internal super ego that has gone beyond the role of looking after. Holding back, keeping down. Beholden to the man.

Children are allowed to play more than adults. Adults have pets to play. Laugh and encourage the pet to play is admissable. But can the adult do the same?

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

Gia looked up and said ” … but I really love the guy” Love or Longing?
We all think we know what we mean when we hear the word love in a conversation. There is a general consensus what we mean when we say that we love (or hate) our parents, siblings, children, friends, work colleagues.

But the guy Gia is referring to – is inattentive, absent, withdrawn. She wants more from him. But he is unable or not wanting to give himself to the relationship. Neither of us can work out how or why? She blames the distance. He is a mystery to her and therefore me. Gia spends a lot of time imagining who he might be or what he feels about her. She talks about what she wants from him: a closeness, intimacy ‘a real relationship’ as she puts it. Yet this is what she calls love.

And in a way she is right. Coming from absent self absorbed parents all Gia has known is a loneliness, a gap, a missing, an emptiness. A longing for a version of love that she has never had.I feel the gap in the room between the two of us. I mishear, don’t understand, get distracted, get things wrong. Falling into the invitation of the self absorbed absent parent.

To understand that we love how we experienced early love is resisted. To be aware that we repeat our love experience – rather than create a model of a healthier love causes us pain. Gia love is longing, and the guy is the guy she loves to fuel the longing. It’s easy to think that Gia is in the wrong relationship. But is she?

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
All rights reserved Disclaimer:
This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique