Z
Zebra-Thinking, Zoom
Zebra Thinking
What Melanie Klein called “Splitting” (see S) and others might call “All or Nothing” I call zebra thinking: the tendency to see possible interactions with the world in black and white terms.
Zizzi fears expressing her feelings to her boyfriend because to say “I don’t like this very much” would feel, to her, as dangerous as saying “Fuck off you arsehole, I hate you!” Zubin, similarly, fears expressing affection to the girl he’s been dating because “I really like you” might sound like “I love you and want to marry you and be with you forever” which may frighten the girl away.
People will often have had experiences which provoke them to see life on a scale of only 1 (“say nothing”) or 10 (“say everything”). It’s hard for them to imagine expressing anything in the mid-range - a 3 or a 5 or a 7 - which would be saying “I don’t like this but I still love you and we’re all good” or “I really like you and I don’t know where this is going but I’m really enjoying it at the moment”.
Zebra-thinking can often enter the therapy relationship. The client feels that if they don’t do their ‘homework’ the therapist will punish them. Or if they reveal something embarrassing about their sexual life or their vindictiveness or their confusion the therapist will respond with harsh judgment rather than open-minded concern. In such cases, the ‘transference’ (see T) in which the therapist essentially ‘becomes’ someone else from the client’s past becomes a key tool. And this then opens the option to try and do something else, to see if the dial – previously stuck perpetually on a 1 or a 10 – can be gently moved to a 2 or a 9, or maybe even a 3 or an 8.
Thinking in black and white terms provides clarity, but not the value of the shades in between.
Zoom
Covid changed the world. It gave us Zoom.
Hitherto the presumption amongst most therapists was that therapy was an “in the room” experience. For clients a key criterion for picking somebody would be location: not too far from work or home. For therapists remote sessions would largely be a back-up to call on in exceptional circumstances. After all, how can we feel what our client is going through when we can only see them from the neck up?
Covid taught us all to get over that.
In 2020 three quarters of all my sessions were online. In 2021 it was maybe 30%, mostly for reasons of Covid, whether directly (lockdowns and caution) or indirectly (the client had moved away during the crisis and decided to stay there). In 2022 it’s about a quarter, all for reasons of location: the client wanted to see me but lives, works or studies outside of London or abroad. Pre-2020 I presume they would have found someone more accessible. But now, why should they? They can have the therapist they get the best sense of online, and I can be a therapist to more or less anyone in the world.
I had never heard of Zoom before March 2020. By April 2020 Zoom was what allowed me to continue seeing people, put me in the fortunate position of not losing a single client due to the pandemic and everybody being able to get the support they needed and not have to wait for the crisis to be over, which at the time felt like it might be years away.
For some clients Zoom is very sub-optimal indeed: a only-if-needed back-up, never a first resort. But for many it has distinct therapeutic advantages as well as its practical benefits. Clients with trauma can find it safer, as they’re in their own environment rather than in the sometimes intimidating terrain of the therapy room. Clients burdened by shame can find embarrassing material easier to share to a face online than to someone whose aftershave they can smell a few metres away. I have some clients that I work with regularly in both ‘formats’ and each has their particular advantages or shortcomings which are very useful to note in themselves.
Covid taught us many things: the fragility of our health, the adaptability of most industries when challenges arrive, the danger of putting a malignant narcissist in charge of a once-a-century crisis. But it also showed us that contact, support, love and intimacy can sometimes be achieved via different means.
The world of therapy changed as a result. And Zoom deserves some of the credit for that.
A-Z of Therapy
Thank you for reading these 101 terms over the last 7 months. I hope you’ve found them helpful.