Martin Wells's Blog
April 26, 2020
Projections onto the virus
The following are some thoughts about therapeutic mental health work at the time of this pandemic.
I have often noticed that significant events that happen during therapy present an opportunity to go to the heart of the personal narrative and to the earliest attachment traumas and patterns. Maybe this world crisis presents us all with just such an opportunity?
A Rorschach test
The pandemic is, no doubt, a significant event in all our lives and across the whole planet. I’ve been noticing in myself and others what people are focussed on in relation to the pandemic and how it affects them. It has become like a vast Rorschach test potentially giving insight into our perceptions of ourselves and in relation to others.
For example, in some, the virus is stimulating a fear of invasion and a heightening of paranoia.
For others it mirrors an uncaring other (mother) that indiscriminately attacks and even kills, treating beings like objects.
Some are focussed on how dangerous the world has become perhaps stimulating memories of violence, hyper vigilance and anxiety.
Others relating to a profound sense of powerlessness perhaps echoing the powerlessness of the child in the face of abuse or neglect.
Just about everyone will be reminded of times of loneliness and isolation and for some this will be extreme. One mental health patient said he was relieved that the rest of the population now knew what isolation felt like.
The effect of these projections and our reactions to them can be very painful and troubling. They can take us back in time to the origins of our attachment patterns with the original feelings being stimulated with the same intensity.
An Opportunity? - from lockdown to look down
Although potentially re-traumatising and emotionally challenging this revisiting of old patterns maybe also presents us with an opportunity, what some have called an enforced retreat. Stripped of many of our usual distractions and in lockdown forced to stop our relentless forward movement and maybe look down into our inner world.
* First we have the chance to open up to feelings that were not expressed at the time of the original trauma. In mindfulness this is simply described as noticing and accepting whatever arises. There’s no attempt to change anything, more of an allowing and a letting go. Very commonly there is deep grief for what was lost or what was missing.
* Second we have the opportunity to discriminate between fact and fiction. What really happened and what was the story we told ourselves about it. For example: fact: ‘I was rejected’ story: ‘I am a reject’ (something wrong with me, not ok, bad person etc).
This discrimination can wake us up from a perception of ourselves and the world that may well have influenced our whole lives and help to let go of the fictional narrative to reveal the true self.
The Bigger picture
In a wider global sense perhaps the pandemic offers the same opportunity. A chance to dissolve our cultural fictions and illusions allowing what is real to come into view. For example the shattering of the illusion of celebrity revealing and reminding us who are our real heroes or the illusion that economic growth is sustainable reminding us that love is.
I have often noticed that significant events that happen during therapy present an opportunity to go to the heart of the personal narrative and to the earliest attachment traumas and patterns. Maybe this world crisis presents us all with just such an opportunity?
A Rorschach test
The pandemic is, no doubt, a significant event in all our lives and across the whole planet. I’ve been noticing in myself and others what people are focussed on in relation to the pandemic and how it affects them. It has become like a vast Rorschach test potentially giving insight into our perceptions of ourselves and in relation to others.
For example, in some, the virus is stimulating a fear of invasion and a heightening of paranoia.
For others it mirrors an uncaring other (mother) that indiscriminately attacks and even kills, treating beings like objects.
Some are focussed on how dangerous the world has become perhaps stimulating memories of violence, hyper vigilance and anxiety.
Others relating to a profound sense of powerlessness perhaps echoing the powerlessness of the child in the face of abuse or neglect.
Just about everyone will be reminded of times of loneliness and isolation and for some this will be extreme. One mental health patient said he was relieved that the rest of the population now knew what isolation felt like.
The effect of these projections and our reactions to them can be very painful and troubling. They can take us back in time to the origins of our attachment patterns with the original feelings being stimulated with the same intensity.
An Opportunity? - from lockdown to look down
Although potentially re-traumatising and emotionally challenging this revisiting of old patterns maybe also presents us with an opportunity, what some have called an enforced retreat. Stripped of many of our usual distractions and in lockdown forced to stop our relentless forward movement and maybe look down into our inner world.
* First we have the chance to open up to feelings that were not expressed at the time of the original trauma. In mindfulness this is simply described as noticing and accepting whatever arises. There’s no attempt to change anything, more of an allowing and a letting go. Very commonly there is deep grief for what was lost or what was missing.
* Second we have the opportunity to discriminate between fact and fiction. What really happened and what was the story we told ourselves about it. For example: fact: ‘I was rejected’ story: ‘I am a reject’ (something wrong with me, not ok, bad person etc).
This discrimination can wake us up from a perception of ourselves and the world that may well have influenced our whole lives and help to let go of the fictional narrative to reveal the true self.
The Bigger picture
In a wider global sense perhaps the pandemic offers the same opportunity. A chance to dissolve our cultural fictions and illusions allowing what is real to come into view. For example the shattering of the illusion of celebrity revealing and reminding us who are our real heroes or the illusion that economic growth is sustainable reminding us that love is.
April 13, 2020
Welcome Every Guest
How might the words of a 13th century Persian poet guide us through the Corona crisis?
The sun's corona, the crown that encircles it, is normally visible only during a total solar eclipse. What might come into view during this dark time for human beings? Maybe Rumi’s poem ‘The Guest House’ offers the ultimate challenge for these times: embrace it all and it may clear you ‘for some new delight’. Do we have the courage and creativity to open the door in this way?
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. Rumi
The profound truth of Rumi’s poem has been increasingly liberating to me personally and in my work as an NHS psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher. In my experience a breakdown inevitably carries the potential of a breakthrough. What usually breaks down is an old coping style that no longer works for us. The style that was used to solve a problem and has now become the problem.
The experience of the breakdown is usually frightening, shattering old patterns and familiar structures, facing us with uncertainty and the unknown. It can feel like a failure, a problem that needs fixing where we desperately use old styles to solve it. For example if we have always been fighting it could be time to surrender!
But conversely, as Rumi suggests, what if we can learn to welcome the breakdown? To approach it completely differently it not as a failure but as a creative process and, instead, give our attention to what is breaking through.
Each crisis seems to bring what is needed for the change to occur. It is not what we want but what we need, as though we are unconsciously participating in the design.
For example when my wife had both hips replaced, she was on crutches for eight months. When we looked back on a very tough time, she had learnt to let go of a fierce independence and ask for help and I had learnt how to take care of her and myself at the same time to avoid burning out.
In a crisis the fighter can discover that although they are winning all the little battles they are losing the war. Now they need to learn to retreat or give way, the opposite to the now habitual reaction they have employed all along. For the person whose style has been hiding or withdrawal they may be forced into the open. The breakdown of the false self reveals the hidden true self.
We only have to look at the natural world to see this is not a cosmetic process: The caterpillar breaks down to liquid in the chrysalis before its emergence and transformation.
The current global Corona pandemic crisis mirrors what happens on an individual micro level. The effects are catastrophic and the suffering for millions on a functional level is vast.
We could attempt to patch things up when it has passed and revert to old patterns or we could, as Rumi suggests, embrace the breakdown of these old styles and allow the breakthrough of a more natural way of being.
Similarly in the global picture can we allow the pandemic to take us out of our comfort zone? Eckhart Tolle in ‘A New Earth’ compares this to the fish leaving the sea, ‘where it could live with much greater ease’ to be instead on dry land. He goes on to say:
It seems unlikely that a species would venture into such an alien environment and undergo an evolutionary transformation unless it was compelled to do so by some crisis situation. Tolle 2015
This extraordinary time raises some possibilities of what this breakthrough might look like and how it could possibly revolutionise modern living across the globe. Let's resist the temptation to ‘go back to normal’ and to allow this guest to wake us up from our complacency
The sun's corona, the crown that encircles it, is normally visible only during a total solar eclipse. What might come into view during this dark time for human beings? Maybe Rumi’s poem ‘The Guest House’ offers the ultimate challenge for these times: embrace it all and it may clear you ‘for some new delight’. Do we have the courage and creativity to open the door in this way?
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. Rumi
The profound truth of Rumi’s poem has been increasingly liberating to me personally and in my work as an NHS psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher. In my experience a breakdown inevitably carries the potential of a breakthrough. What usually breaks down is an old coping style that no longer works for us. The style that was used to solve a problem and has now become the problem.
The experience of the breakdown is usually frightening, shattering old patterns and familiar structures, facing us with uncertainty and the unknown. It can feel like a failure, a problem that needs fixing where we desperately use old styles to solve it. For example if we have always been fighting it could be time to surrender!
But conversely, as Rumi suggests, what if we can learn to welcome the breakdown? To approach it completely differently it not as a failure but as a creative process and, instead, give our attention to what is breaking through.
Each crisis seems to bring what is needed for the change to occur. It is not what we want but what we need, as though we are unconsciously participating in the design.
For example when my wife had both hips replaced, she was on crutches for eight months. When we looked back on a very tough time, she had learnt to let go of a fierce independence and ask for help and I had learnt how to take care of her and myself at the same time to avoid burning out.
In a crisis the fighter can discover that although they are winning all the little battles they are losing the war. Now they need to learn to retreat or give way, the opposite to the now habitual reaction they have employed all along. For the person whose style has been hiding or withdrawal they may be forced into the open. The breakdown of the false self reveals the hidden true self.
We only have to look at the natural world to see this is not a cosmetic process: The caterpillar breaks down to liquid in the chrysalis before its emergence and transformation.
The current global Corona pandemic crisis mirrors what happens on an individual micro level. The effects are catastrophic and the suffering for millions on a functional level is vast.
We could attempt to patch things up when it has passed and revert to old patterns or we could, as Rumi suggests, embrace the breakdown of these old styles and allow the breakthrough of a more natural way of being.
Similarly in the global picture can we allow the pandemic to take us out of our comfort zone? Eckhart Tolle in ‘A New Earth’ compares this to the fish leaving the sea, ‘where it could live with much greater ease’ to be instead on dry land. He goes on to say:
It seems unlikely that a species would venture into such an alien environment and undergo an evolutionary transformation unless it was compelled to do so by some crisis situation. Tolle 2015
This extraordinary time raises some possibilities of what this breakthrough might look like and how it could possibly revolutionise modern living across the globe. Let's resist the temptation to ‘go back to normal’ and to allow this guest to wake us up from our complacency
