Recounting a timeline of your past alone will not navigate you out of these muddy waters. You have to engage in relationships, see what comes up in the present, and be able to withstand the discomfort of when your wires cross with your partner’s—long enough, at least, to determine the origin of the conflict, and whether or not it is rectifiable. Keep in mind, those wires can change, but not when left alone in isolation. And not if you only talk about it. Talk therapy alone falls short for three reasons:
1.Most talk therapies are ego based, which means they rely on your conscious mind to have insight. But insight alone is passive, it doesn’t change patterns, merely allows for the possibility of change. Because it is partly unconscious, your true self is by nature unknowable in its entirety, and thus you cannot think and talk your way to wholeness. Yet the thinking self is obsessed with remaining in control and struggles to accept what it does not understand. If given free reign, it will spin around in passive, insightful circles rather than allowing an intuitive, implicit awareness to become a transformative libidinal force.
2.Because most talk therapies are ego based, they are ill equipped to provide affective learning experiences. Affective experiences are those that stimulate us physically and emotionally. Emotions are always connected to the body because sensations are the first form emotions take, and are often expressed through the body (such as with anxiety). Affective learning thus becomes meaningful learning, which is essential to mental and emotional growth. This in turn bolsters the ego in a positive way, making it more flexible and better able to hold opposing ideas at the same time, which allows for abstraction, complex emotions, and a deeper understanding of those emotions. Unless therapy activates and/or acknowledges the body in some fashion, it won’t be affectively effective (Maisel and Raeburn, 2008; Ogden, Minton, and Pain, 2006; Satir, 1988; van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth, 1996).
3.The language of talk therapy is subject to “the reductionism of words.” It is easiest to understand this concept when comparing the language of the ego to the language of the unconscious, which is one of somatic experiences, images, symbols, and metaphors. We go to therapy to examine pressures and motivations we experience but do not understand, using ineffective tools. It’s like trying to repair a leaky roof with a hammer that has no head. Or going to a foreign country where you do not speak the language and make no effort to learn it, but still expect one day to wake up fluent. Words are essential to integrating unconscious symbols into our conscious awareness, but we must first be willing and able to set aside the thinking-mind (sometimes referred to as “monkey mind”), which communicates in a language of words, in order for unconscious material to emerge, through an entirely different form of communication (Robbins, 1994; Welwood, 2000).
Creative arts therapists have been working with a language that appeals to the unconscious and provides affective experiences for years. It is a language of the body, metaphors, images, and symbols. Arthur Robbins (1994, p.4), author of A Multi-Modal Approach To Creative Art Therapy, states:
Symbol and image have become the inner codifications of my experiences. They defy the reductionism of words as they hold and mirror the complexity of my early attachments, link past to present, and point to my future. As organizer of my past, this world of symbol and image holds my polarities of hate and love, bad and good.
It is the vocabulary of creativity that allows for ego flexibility and the revision of seemingly unchangeable patterns of loving and mourning.
References
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3
Complicated Grief
Briana MacWilliam and Dina Schapiro
A brief history
Complicated grief occurs when an individual experiences prolonged, unabated grief. The neural mechanisms distinguishing complicated grief from non-complicated grief are unclear, but hypothesized mechanisms include both pain-related pathways, related to the social pain of loss, and reward-related pathways, related to attachment behavior (O’Connor et al., 2008). Four principles of attachment functioning are helpful in understanding complicated grief (Shear et al., 2007):
1.Attachment relationships provide support for healthy physical, mental, and emotional functioning.
2.Mental representations of attachment figures shape our expectations for caregiving.
3.Stress activates a need to be close to our attachment figures and receive loving attention, while inhibiting our desire to explore and seek novel stimulation.
4.Among adults, providing care is valued equally or even more so than receiving care.
Acute grief and the process of integrating the loss usually occur naturally and without the need for active effort. Once the loss is integrated, yearning and searching diminish, grief intensity declines, and there is often a deep feeling of connection to the deceased. Individuals suffering from complicated grief fail to experience reprieve from pain and longing. Caught in a loop of prolonged grief symptoms and complicating