G
Gender, Grief, Grounding
Gender
The respective genders of the therapist and client are often highly relevant to the work. Here’s how.
First, different genders will have different experiences of the world and thus different sensitivities to it. The relationship can replicate this: Gaynor may believe her male therapist cannot understand what it’s like to be objectified; Griff may feel awkward talking about his masculinity to his female therapist for fear of feeling emasculated. Gerry may be nervous of meeting a cis therapist for fear of being rejected for his gender identity like he has frequently been by others.
Erotic or intimate ingredients can play out too: flirting (consciously or otherwise), attraction or a sense of courtship. For many, these feelings - far from being pleasurable - are loaded with negative associations. All of these are human responses and can be just as valuable as many other dynamics. But it can also be terrifying for the client and sometimes very uncomfortable for the therapist.
The second reason – discussed in more detail in my blog Choosing a Therapist - https://benetcattytherapy.com/thoughts-1?offset=1599606683347 – is how the choice of a particular gender of therapist is relevant to the client. Do they only feel comfortable with their own gender, or does that have challenging associations? If the client has had a repeated experience with a particular gender (being let down, or abandoned, or abused) they may ‘project’ this onto the therapist. Does a trans woman only want to see a trans therapist who may have a similar life experience, or be seeking a cis therapist who may represent the world she is trying to navigate?
There are good reasons on all sides, but it is worth nothing what your personal response might reveal.
Grief
Grief frequently laces the therapeutic experience, not always in obvious ways. We grieve for someone who has died, but just as often we find ourselves grieving for a relationship, an opportunity, a memory, or even ourselves – the person we hoped to be, perhaps, or the time in our lives which was stolen by a trauma in our past.
The go-to person on grief is Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the Swiss-American psychiatrist who wrote twenty books on the subject of death, and gave birth to the widely-known Five Stages of Grief. We may pass through each of them in varying order, flip back and forth between them, or even not experience some of its stages at all.
These five stages map what she called “grief’s terrain”.
Denial
Following a huge loss, our psyche decides that we cannot cope with it. We understand (usually) that the loss has taken place but we experience it as if it’s a bad dream, perhaps feeling as if the person will soon be home from work, and we are still able to go about our lives relatively well. “It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle”, Kubler-Ross tells us.
Anger
Often illogical but frequently passionate, we feel burning anger: at the person who died (how could they leave me?), at ourselves (why didn’t I realise….?), at other people (how dare they carry on without this burden?), maybe at God (why are you punishing me like this?).
While horrible – and sometimes challenging for the people around us to experience – anger is a good sign: it suggests we feel we are safe enough to experience it and survive. It’s important. As Kubler-Ross says “don’t let anyone criticise your anger, not even you”.
Bargaining
Bargaining is the “if only” stage; the place where “what if…” and “next time….” occupy our thoughts. It is our mind taking charge for a while: changing the past or seeking to change the future by imagining a parallel world in which something or someone isn’t lost. Ultimately, of course, we must come to the crucial but tragic realisation: it makes no difference. The person has still gone.
Depression
As with anger, depression is an emotion which many people are very bad at handling when they see it in their loved ones. They try to cheer us up or help us to “move on” (or away) from it. Whereas in fact a withdrawing of our energy - from the world and ourselves – is a completely necessary response.
Kubler-Ross says “…depression is a way for nature to keep us protected by shutting down the nervous system so that we can adapt to something we feel we cannot handle”.
Acceptance
Acceptance is not being ok with the loss, or meant to suggest “getting over it”. When we’ve lost someone or something important to us it may be unlikely that we’ll ever fully “get over” it and nor would we want to. As the Queen said following 9/11, “grief is the price we pay for love”. But acceptance is where we accept the new reality and begin to feel we can operate in a world in which that person is no longer with us, that time in our life is never coming back, this new normal is where we will be living. It’s not about liking it; it’s about accepting that we can find a way of operating within it, however much we wish we wouldn’t have to.
Grief is a fundamental ingredient of many therapeutic experiences, and finding acceptance is perhaps its biggest challenge.
Grounding
When we panic, or dissociate, or become overwhelmed, we can ‘float away’, get into our heads, become dizzy, tired or seasick. Our mind is working so hard that it maxes out: like a music system turned up so loud that the sound becomes fuzzy. We need to keep our feet on the ground, literally.
The answer to this, as I frequently tell clients, lies in three words: breath, bottom, feet.
To ground ourselves (to keep ourselves cool, calm and connected) we first need to breathe, as when we are overwhelmed we forget to breathe, our brain gets less oxygen and that’s what makes us feel faint.
Having done that, we need to bring our focus to the two areas that bring us downwards and more in touch with gravity: the bottom and the feet: our bottom that rests on a chair (or should; lying down often helps add to our floatiness; sitting on something firm is much better), and our feet connected to the floor.
Activate those areas (wriggling on the chair, tapping or smearing your feet while you talk and breathe and feel) will usually, with patience, bring down your heart rate, counter-balance the energy in your head, and bring you back to earth.
You can practice this even while reading this blog. Do it now.
Breath. Bottom. Feet.
Next Week: H
Homework, Horizontalisation, “How Do You Feel About That?”, Humour