The “Intimate Relationship”

Therapists mostly see ordinary people who are unhappy with their lives in one way or another that falls short of the distress needed for psychiatric treatment. One of the things these people must have in common (otherwise why would they see a therapist?) is the lack of anyone they can trust, feel comfortable and safe with, and can share their innermost thoughts, fears, hopes and dreams, without censure or judgement. Since that is what therapists say they provide(1), it seems reasonable to conclude that if they had such a friend, they would not need a therapist. Since the client isn’t going to carry on with therapy indefinitely, it makes sense to suggest that they find someone like this.

Hence the emergence of the idea of the “intimate relationship”, which provides “emotional intimacy”.

This represents a yearning many people have when going through periods of insecurity and doubt. The benefit is supposed to be that “a problem shared is a problem halved” and “misery loves company”, that, having unburdened ourselves, we will go forth and do something about it.

A number of observations.

These relationships require trust, and that’s earned, not given. Opportunities for people to show that they are trustworthy, or to see that someone else is, are few and far between. Not because this is a jungle of a world, but precisely because it isn’t: when everyone is well-behaved, watches their language to avoid offence, only expresses views that conform to the standards of the time and place, and otherwise goes-along-to-get-along, nobody has any idea what anyone really believes and hence if they can be trusted. The risks of badly-chosen trust can run from losing one’s job to being ostracised by one’s family, and those just aren’t risks worth taking.

(Better, perhaps, to go to someone who is bound by confidentiality, can be sued if they break it, and knows nobody you know. That’s what therapists really get paid for.)

The conversations may consist of one person venting while the other listens, and there’s no intention to solve the problem. At worst this allows the venter to remain in a situation they should really leave, so that the listener is put in the position of enabling some dysfunction in the venter’s life. Almost as bad is that the venting is a drama pay-off for the venter, putting the listener in the position of a passive one-person audience to what is really a soliloquy. Most people, if they suspect they are just there for the talker to vent, will get themselves out of it - sometimes with the remark that “it sounds like you need to see a therapist”.

The speaker may not be talking about what they need to be talking about, and do not know what they need to be talking about. We can usually sense this, even if we don’t know the details. It reduces the listener to being polite and helpless, which is not something people usually want to be, and the usual way out is to sympathetically admit that they can’t really help, and maybe the speaker should see a therapist.

Whoever we share with must understand what we are talking about, and we must know they understand. We need to know they have been through something like we are going through, or have been through, and also that their circumstances are enough like ours that whatever it was had a similar effect on their lives as it did on ours. Hence the phrase “you weren’t there, you couldn’t know”. Only those who were there, who have been through the same thing, can know, and so understand what our words mean. To everyone else, we may as well be speaking in Mandarin: they won’t know about the details, and it’s the details that matter.

For some people, such experiences create a sense of alienation: no-one who wasn’t there will ever understand them. Communication with people who weren’t there will never be much above the level of swapping mundane facts or talking about the weather. Even if we never meet other people who “were there”, the possibility of that conversation remains as the standard by which all others will fail.

Relationships are “for-something-together”: playing seven-a-side, raising children, installing double-glazing, cooking food, watching a movie, talking about a subject of mutual interest, baby-sitting each other’s children, spotting each other at the gym, and so on. Venting-and-listening might be on this list, but if it’s the whole relationship, we’re probably looking at a narcissist taking advantage of a co-dependent.

So the “intimacy” is only part of the relationship: in other words, it’s someone you have-to-do with for one purpose, and you also trust them enough to talk about whatever-it-is, and you think they will be sympathetic to such a conversation. It’s not the relationship that’s “intimate”, it’s some conversations you have as a consequence of the relationship.

If you have someone in your life like that, you’re lucky. Use the opportunity too often, and you may lose them.



(1) I’m not being cynical. If you reveal un-Islamic thoughts to your Islamic therapist, or un-liberal thoughts to your liberal therapist, you will be subject to ideological correction, because that’s what they think you came to them for. That’s not what you go to your “intimate friendship” for.

Happy Birthday To Me

I was 70 last month. I celebrated on the day itself by having a blood test (at 08:00!) to make sure I still had the necessary hormones and chemicals in the right proportions. Seems I do.

The month was filled with dentistry, osteopathy, and having my garden hard standing re-surfaced, so I was too busy to linger long on the symbolism of passing 70.

When I was a young lad, there weren’t many men over 70. Men died pretty briskly after retiring, mainly because they had been doing jobs that left them physically depleted and, as we now know, stuffed full of asbestos and other such damaging substances. For men, 75 was old, 80 was almost un-heard of, except amongst the very well-off and some Chelsea Pensioners.

70 doesn’t have any significance. It’s just one more post-retirement year marked by a slow decline in one’s energy levels. 80 is the new 60 - the age at which one can expect to live five more years (or not).

Ten years. When I was twenty, that was a lifetime.

Maybe it still is.

Relationships as Identity (or Not)

If there’s one thing everyone in the psychology business agrees on, it’s that people really benefit from being in relationships. We are happier, feel more connected, feel that our lives have more purpose and direction, we are healthier, less stressed and more relaxed.

(That is not a factual statement, and isn’t meant to be. It is aspirational, a statement about what the consequences of relationships should be. A relationship that doesn’t have some of those consequences is “un-healthy” or “toxic”, “abusive”, “exploitative”, and other words meaning“bad”.)

Writing this, it struck me that the Big-Name philosophers don’t write much about relationships. They focus on the individual (morality) and the institutions that govern individuals (politics). They might have talked about one’s “relations with other people”, but that was about how well one dealt with, got along with, and otherwise had-to-with others. One could be arrogant in one’s relations, or too meek, or well-judged, or many other qualities.

The current idea is a tangle of different things: it refers to a kind of informal implicit contract: I expect this and that from you, and you expect this and that from me; it refers to how we behave with others; it can also refer to the possibilities for the future, and the lost opportunities in the past; the history of how and when we met, treated each other, and felt about it at the time and afterwards; it is the current condition of our dealings and feelings; it may also have institutional or social significance, such as being part of the feudal hierarchy of an organisation, or “significant others”, or “sworn enemies”. “Relationships” make up a large chunk of our biographies, and hence in some sense, our so-far realised selves.

This idea emerges with the development of a line in psychology that defines an individual’s identity as much or more by their relationships, than their personal qualities and abilities - and this makes sense, as after all, many of our personal qualities refer to our behaviour around other people. However it often turns into the implicit claim that people with very few relationships are not fully people, but rather just a collection of ingredients waiting to be made into a person by mixing and baking them in the heat of “relationships”. (There is no doubt that children do not develop into functioning adults unless they have parents, teachers, and peers, but after reaching adulthood that ends. Adults without much interpersonal contact may become eccentric - or do other people avoid them because they are already slightly eccentric?)

If there is a definition of an “ordinary person”, it is one for whom their relationships form the principal part of their biography and identity.

One may be “un-ordinary” in many ways, perhaps by having a goal or skill to which one is dedicated, and which one’s relationships either enable, or are subordinate. Athletes, performing artists, research mathematicians, entrepreneurs, politicians, and similar, are good examples. They may also have partners, children and an extended family life, but they fit around the central purpose (especially in providing excuses for getting out of unwanted purpose-related engagements). That’s where their identity comes from. If those people use therapists at all, they will use therapists who specialise in whichever type of un-ordinary they are.

Faced with a generalist, ideological psycho-therapist used to dealing with ordinary people, the un-ordinary person should apologise for being an introvert. This is a Magic Word that therapists must respect. They will usually adapt their “go out and meet more people, and join a local club or association” advice accordingly.

It Is About The Nail

A lot of work goes into theories of how the patient / client came to have their problem. The answer is invariably something that happened in the past, and therefore cannot be changed.(1) It’s the same with a viral infection: does it really matter where or from whom you got it? What matters is whether there’s an available affordable antidote or if you have to sweat it out.

Here’s a simpler approach.

You’re doing something DoublePlusUnGood. The next time you get an urge to do it - don’t. Even if it means you have to stand under a cold shower, run a mile, or bang your head against the wall. You’re allowed to do anything (except self-harm) you need to do to stop yourself doing it. You can give the bathroom a thorough clean, or finally sand down and varnish those shelves. Whatever it takes.

Start by removing yourself from as many of the temptations as you can. Alcoholics stop going into pubs, bars and off-licenses, and stay away from the booze shelves in the supermarket. If you only ever see Eddie and Frank to have a drink, stop seeing Eddie and Frank. Nobody said this was easy. Other people with other addictions can take relevant pre-emptive avoiding action.

You’re going to think about doing whatever it is. That’s okay. This isn’t about the chaos inside your head - yet - it’s about what you do.

Just don’t do it.

Rinse, repeat, until it becomes easier.

It’s AA in disguise, of course. What the Floundering Fathers recognised was that giving up drinking (or enter your vice here) for ever was too much to contemplate. Not having the next drink is way, way, easier. So is focusing on what you need to do today, and not worrying about tomorrow or yesterday.

That’s the advice that the addict / screw-up needs to get them started. Happiness and all those other good things will follow as a consequence, once the noise in their heads has quietened down, and they have some confidence that they can get through a bad patch without giving way to the wrong temptation.

However, addicts have Meetings. Meetings don’t always work for everyone, and nobody knows how they work for the people they work for. There’s just something about being in a group of people being honest about whatever is The Problem. You’re not alone. It can be done, because others are doing it.

Meetings are for things one wants to stop doing.

The idea doesn’t work for things that one wants to start doing. Underearners Anonymous is the closest to that, and I’ve been to those meetings. It helped me, but I’m not sure it helped many of the other people. The reference book is pretty good though.

I think psycho-therapy can be useful in helping the client understand what may be getting in the way of doing the things they need to do to achieve the things they want to achieve. In the end, it comes down to a programme of practical action, and that’s either the Steps or it’s some kind of self-improvement (take a class, go to the gym, say “hi” to one girl a day, whatever). It’s not the essentially reflective and exploratory process of psycho-therapy.

Because, in the end, it is about the nail.



(1) However, knowing what that historical something is will help you see its consequences as put there by someone else and so that can be removed or ignored in the future.

The Unavoidability of Ideology in Psycho-Therapy

Doctors and surgeons deal with stuff that is obviously wrong with the body in front of them. We can know what is wrong with something, without knowing what is right for it. The absence of wrong things does not mean anything is especially right about it. Between “Yuck” and “Wow” is a large range of “okay I guess”.

Doctors and surgeons are trained to identify what is or might be wrong with the body in front of them. They do not have as clear an idea of what a “good” body might function and look like, never mind how a “healthy person” might live. They might point out that the idea assumes that there is only one way, or at most a very narrow range of ways, that counts as “healthy”, while all the evidence suggests that there are many ways people can live perfectly well.

The equivalent for a psycho-therapist would be to identify the various insults, abuses, mis-uses, missed good times and learning opportunities, that the client endured on their way into adulthood. Just how badly were they brought up? Was it all the parents, or was the young client a puzzling tearaway or otherwise hard to deal with? What limiting beliefs has the client got as a result? And so on.

Having discovered those injuries, the therapist should explain what the client can do to change the way they think, how they live, who they spend time with, and so on, if the client wants to stop feeling the angers, resentments and other negative emotions, and become a more normal person. There may be limits to the changes the client can make or is prepared to make, and the therapist must respect those.

The question is where the idea of the “normal person” comes from.

One answer is that it comes from psycho-therapeutic practice. Therapists hear patients complaining that their lives would be better if only they had this and that and the other thing, and conclude that this and that and the other thing are essential requirements for human happiness. With this in mind, plus memories of the course on “positive psychology” at university, they start to concoct a list… I mean, construct a model of what a “good life” looks like. This model then guides the way they talk to, hear, and advise their clients.

The therapist should explain what is involved in this “good life” and ask the client if there is anything they particularly want, or that clashes with their other goals. The weakness of this approach is that there is a fair amount of slop in the interpretation of the specifics of the “good life”. It’s at this point that the therapist can, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps with the firm conviction of their correctness, foist their own ideologies on their clients.

This open-ness to ideology is not a bug of psycho-therapy. It’s a feature. The therapist has to use their own experience and understanding, some of which will come from their ideological leanings, to interpret the ideas in the model. It’s unavoidable.

Most of the clients want to find love, connection, cut out the substance abuse, stop self-harming, get along well with others, and stop being so damn sensitive all the time. They want to “go along to get along”, to fit into a social / political / moral way of life, “to be good members of society” - but as they see what it is to be a “good member of society”. It’s important that the client and the therapist do not have any points of serious disagreement about what that is.

Therapists and psychologists are inclined to be ideological. The majority of therapists are women, as are the majority of therapeutic clients. The subject has developed to deal with women’s problems in a way that makes sense to women. There are male therapists and psychologists, but they have to get through the market- and ideologically-slanted university courses and professional training, and so have to adopt the relevant protective ideological plumage.

Therapists openly offering Muslim therapy, Christian therapy, feminist therapy, and other overtly religious or political approaches to therapy are not doing anything wrong. They are providing a specific product to a specific market - if you’re not in that market, you won’t take that product. One possible exception would be when a therapist with a strong social justice / feminist outlook is assigned to a client by the Courts.

As With The Body, So With The Mind

As medicine is to the body, so psychology is supposed to be to the mind or soul.

Doctors and surgeons are in the business of fixing stuff that is obviously and identifiably wrong or broken: broken bones, lumps in the brain, wounds from accidents or fights, really bad cases of food poisoning, malaria, the pox, chlamydia (the STD of preference for straight people), cleft palate… something that can be identified and treated in some way.

At the other end of the spectrum are the physical trainers and dieticians working with (say) a movie star or a Olympic team, or cosmetic surgeons. The aim is to improve something that is already okay and provides a foundation for that improvement.

It’s the in-between that’s awkward. People who aren’t actually sick, but who keep getting colds and infections. People who aren’t actually obese, but who can’t sustain much physical effort. People who have poor diets or can’t get enough exercise. There’s nothing broken and they aren’t suffering from the effects of a virus or bacteria, but they aren’t exactly shining examples of the potential of the human body either. Doctors can’t help because there’s nothing much wrong, and the trainers can’t help because there’s not enough right either.

As with the body, so with the mind.

Psychiatrists are in the business of fixing stuff that is obviously so wrong that the patient is experiencing distress and impaired functioning in their everyday life over an expended period, usually at least six months and often more than a year. That’s a general condition for a psychiatric disorder in the DSM-5. Look at the symptom lists and you will realise that to get a DSM-grade diagnosis, you’re in a bad way. There are symptoms which on their own would have people backing away from the patient slowly and politely and blocking their calls - and DSM diagoses usually require three of more of these. Psychiatrists are also doctors, can prescribe, and insurance companies will often stump up on their signature. Their medical training leads them to want to deal with conditions where there is obviously and identifiably something wrong.

At the other end are of the spectrum are life coaches, dating coaches, PR coaches, dieticians, beauticians, and physical trainers, who work with the (usually) well-off and high(er) functioning middle- and upper-classes. The aim is to improve something that is already working reasonably well.

It’s the in-between that’s awkward. The people who aren’t quite distressed, but don’t feel happy either. They are holding down a job suitable for their abilities, paying the bills, eating reasonably, not getting blitzed every night, and otherwise taking care of everyday maintenance… but they might not be having much fun either. They aren’t scared of talking to people, but it’s not their favourite thing to do. They don’t think they are awful, but there’s a nagging voice in residence somewhere in their head. Or maybe they are just oblivious and wonder why they only ever meet people once. They may get hugs, but not from the person they really want to be hugged by - just someone who will do.

These people are the market for psycho-therapy. They need to be working or have access to money because they will need to pay the therapist themselves - the insurance companies only pay for psychiatrists - and maybe they could get some therapy on the NHS. If they could get to see a GP, and the GP didn’t just write for some low-grade prescription anti-depressants.

What are psycho-therapists supposed to do with these people? Find something wrong and try to fix it? Give the patient what amounts to a self-improvement programme of exercise, dietary change, sleep routines, removing negative thinking and all that jazz? If the patient comes in with a specific problem, the chances are that what they need is a specific solution, and specific is self-improvement.

At first they seemed to follow Freud’s example, and sit quiet while the client talked, or not. The few techniques they used were close to, if not outright, hacks, from so-called “active listening” to suggesting people wrote with their other hand, as it let one’s creativity flow more easily. Some would head for childhood, to find fault there (and be rude about the client’s parents in the process), and some would look for patterns of behaviour that needed changing. Some would interact with the client and some would stay quiet. And some use the “models” from so-called “positive psychology”.

Psychology as Pre-Science

The first time I read Gaston Bachelard’s The Making of the Scientific Mind, I didn’t really understand what I was reading. Same the second time. I mean, I understood the words, but I didn’t get the message. I was expecting to read a story about the change between pre-scientific to scientific ways of thinking. Since Bachelard’s subject is chemistry and life sciences, that transition isn’t as stark as it is in physics.

The book is full of extensive quotes from authors, now unknown as scientists, but famous at the time for writing about phenomena in the real world. Bachelard’s point is that they do so in a shallow way, often using analogies with familiar objects and their properties - the number of things claimed to be analogous to sponges is quite remarkable. These old-style “explanations” read fluently, and no doubt at the time, plausibly. Now, of course, it reads as grammatical gibberish.

It feels like reading a lot of contemporary psychology.

Those seventeenth-century authors made experiments as well. Hundreds of them, but all of them by today’s standards slightly mad, or trivial, having nothing to do with the fundamentals of the relevant science. We’re talking about experiments to prove which combination of coloured tights generates more static electricity. As if that might be significant in itself, rather than, as we would see it, a consequence of more fundamental laws of chemistry and the properties of the dyes and materials.

That feels a lot like contemporary psychology.

People have been making remarks about human behaviour and emotions since before Plato thought that laughter was a way of showing oneself superior to the person one was laughing at. Hume’s famous book is called A Treatise on Human Nature - it’s an extended rant about how devious and rotten people are, interspersed with some more conventional philosophising about the various aspects of the psyche (Reason, Passions, Understanding, and so on). Some of what Hume and others said was perspicacious, some more relevant to their times than ours, and some of it just wrong.

Psychology has many birthdates, and the publication of William James’ two-volume book on Psychology is as good as any other. It’s an odd book, with chapters on how the sense organs work, and a much more famous one exhorting us to the formation of habits as a way to simplify our lives. Descriptive anatomy right alongside old-school moralising. Psychologists have never gave up the combination. Even the ones who look as though they are doing “real science” by investigating the way the brain works, cannot resist the temptation to write pop-science pot-boilers about how their work proves we have no free will or that consciousness is an illusion.

In the next few posts, I’m going to wander around this subject.