F
Fantasy, Fear, Fifty-Minute Hour, Fight/Flight/Freeze, Freud
Fantasy
You might think that therapy is the last place in the world you should be fantasising. You’d be wrong.
Therapy can be a place to imagine. Perhaps to imagine the life you want to live, the things you’d love to say to your partner, the way you’d expect to react to someone saying something to you. It’s a place to practice new feelings or confront scary ones. If you can survive it, then maybe you can take the fantasy out into the real world. If not, then you can leave it safely in the therapy room and the counsellor won’t tell anyone.
Fantasy – whether deliberate or unconscious – is an incredibly valuable tool of therapy. And that’s a fact.
Fear
One of the great titles of any self-help book is Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway. There’s something to that message.
Fear stops us doing, saying, thinking or acting in particular ways. Sometimes we know what we’re afraid of: rejection, anger, violence, shame. But often we don’t. Our body is telling us that to say something will bring terrible consequences, even though our mind knows that those consequences are extremely unlikely. Exploring this in therapy can lead to some interesting revelations, perhaps something like this:
Therapist: So what does it feel would happen if you told your brother how it hurt when he said that?
Client: Nothing. He’s lovely. I’m completely over-reacting.
Therapist: Ok. But is that what your body thinks?
Client: No. It thinks he’ll humiliate me and I’ll never live it down.
Therapist: Has your brother ever reacted that way?
Client: Never. He’s not remotely that kind of person.
Therapist: I wonder why your body is so convinced otherwise.
In such contexts the fear (or fantasy – see above) has overtaken the logic. This is very common. That’s why it’s necessary to work out what the body feels will happen, however seemingly illogical. Sometimes people literally feel they will die if they say something: they know they won’t but they feelthey will.
When we can work out why we can drain the effect of the fear and try and allow the person to respond in the real world.
Fifty-Minute Hour
Therapy sessions run 50 minutes in almost all cases for simple practical reasons: 50 minutes of session, 10 minutes for the therapist to collect their thoughts before their next appointment, time for one person to leave without bumping into the next person arriving early. That’s the logic. But there’s a more prosaic reason steeped in history.
Fifty minutes is how long Freud could go without needing to pee.
Fight/Flight/Freeze – Three Responses to Threat
You’re standing alone in the middle of a deserted country lane and out of nowhere a grizzly bear stands facing you in the middle of the road, twenty feet away. What do you do? You have three options.
You can fight. You run at full force at the bear, perhaps making a guttural roaring sound as you do so. You are ready to break its neck with your bare hands, ideally before it eats your face off with a single bite.
You can fly. You can run as fast as you can and hope to outrun the bear, which, given that its survival depends on running a lot faster than things it wants to eat, could be problematic.
Or you can freeze. You can hold very still, stare the bear down, let it approach you (if it insists) but hope that your calm cool demeanour will mean that it loses interest and moves off to find a better source of nourishment elsewhere.
The bear is “Threat”. Each response might work brilliantly and save your life, or might turn out to feed yourself to the bear. You don’t know.
Which one you pick reveals a lot about you.
Let’s say the threat, for you, is being told off. Do you ‘fight’ – turn your timidity into strength, shout back at the teacher/parent/boss and act like you’re every bit as tough as he is? Do you ‘fly’ – leave the room, change the subject, resign from the job, put as much distance between you and the threat as possible? Or do you ‘freeze’ – go very quiet, try to become invisible, sink into your chair, hope your assailant will just give up on you and leave you alone?
For most of us there is one of these three fear responses which dominates our life. We learnt that at some point.
Therapy can help us take charge of our responses to threat, rather than respond in the way we learnt decades ago.
Freud
Sigmund Freud was the father of psychoanalysis which begat psychotherapy. Most of what we know about the functioning of the human mind and the practice of therapy of any kind was sparked by him – whether following in his example or reacting against it. And more or less everything The Person on the Street thinks about psychology – the id, ego and superego, the Oedipus Complex, dreams, Freudian slips – comes from him.
Smart people like to bitch-slap Freud, for his God complex or his misogyny or his methods. Smarter people know he was a genius writing in a particular time and place.
Freud sits quietly in the corner of most therapeutic encounters. And I am grateful to have him.
Next Week: G
Gender, Grief, Grounding