The Lady of Shallott is one of my favourite pictures. It hung on my sister's bedroom wall and as teenagers we used to wonder why she looked so melancholy. Love lost and lonely ourselves, we thought the lady in the boat might be waiting for someone.
The poem, The Lady of Shalott' by Alfred Lord Tennyson, tells the story of this young woman in medieval England, imprisoned on an island near Camelot. She must weave a colorful web and only watch the outside world through a mirror. If she looks at Camelot directly, she will be cursed.
This looking at the world through a mirror and the curse of daring to look directly at her wished for destiny results in her death, before she reaches the palace of Camelot. Never quite reaching her destination and her longing are pictured above in “The Lady of Shalott” (1888) by John William Waterhouse. The mirror and it's curse play a potent role in this story and still today it has its impact in the form of technology. Think of the selfie.
At this pivotal time in history, we are more concerned with self-image than ever, in part because of the way we view ourselves and others online and that the world is changing necessarily. The internet plays a huge part in the way our sense of identity is defined and this influences our world-view. I heard someone say that the internet is like a giant mirror we created to see ourselves in. We each have our own relationship with the entity that is the internet. It is huge, complex and layered.
Darian Leader, the modern Freudian Analyst said that when the baby first sees himself in the mirror is when he first learns to hate himself. This is because he sees the other baby as a threat and ends up rejecting himself. Social media is like the mirror, we hopefully look for some kind of acknowledgment that our existence is welcome and because of our natural inclination towards a negative bias, we get a huge hit from not getting that recognition.
Jaron Lanier, the American computer scientist, computer philosophy writer and futurist said that the trouble with the internet is that it has no context, therefore it makes sense that posting on social media is a like throwing a pebble over a mountain. You never know where it will land or how. The carefully crafted content probably lands very differently to the way it was intended. How we register in people’s minds on social media is laden with incomplete gestalten, the unfinished business of our interactions, unacknowledged attempts at recognition and existence.
Unfinished business is at the heart of Gestalt therapy and the aim is to close the gestalt, complete a process and get closure, however large or small. Think of all the times no response was made or about ghosting on dating apps or anywhere else for the matter.
A epidemic of self-crises could be the result of an alarmingly diminished sense of who we are in the age of the internet. Apps that run our lives with algorithms designed to know our behaviours, preferences and habits are worrying.
Checking our phones all too frequently and looking up anything and everything answers questions in an instant but do we retain the information? I heard Elon Musk say he could feel TikTok altering his mind and so he deleted it but the irony is that I saw him say it on the very app he was talking about. I too deleted it.
My mind was filling up with tiny snippets of information but not real knowledge. My algorithm showed me a myriad of therapists and life coaches, some expert and some not qualified, all churning out content for the masses. I could be seriously misguided by the therapist who claims to know me better than I do.
Artificial intelligence grows itself based on its own learning, a bit like algorithms, which has a sinister feel, much like the film, Her with Joaquin Phoenix as a man in the not to distant future with a new piece of operating software on his personal computer. She has a beautiful voice and seems interested in knowing him. You can guess the rest.
With this in mind, the writings of Carl Jung offer some comfort, some reassurance and some sanity. I believe this time in history represents a stage in human evolution that will require us to rethink our concept of selfhood and know ourselves in a different way. Aspects of ourselves that have been forgotten, lost in the wilderness of the internet that are as yet unknown, unseen, unheard and perhaps misunderstood need to be found.
To restore a sense of self and belonging in the world, exploring self-identity through archetypes can be liberating. I started working with archetypes many years ago drawing on the work of Caroline Myss, the theologian and teacher of all things spiritual. I propose to form a group where a safe exploration of your archetypes can further personal development in way that enriches who you are. The unique shape of the group with all its participants who bring to it their own energy, personal style and archetypal patterns will inform the process and our findings. Look out for my online and in-person workshops here.
Updated: May 9, 2024
This article comes with kind permission of my client who I have been working with on the sticky business of shame. I have great admiration for this man's courage in talking to me about his experience and allowing me to share a process that is particular to him yet speaks to everyone.
He tells me about what has happened to him. A catastrophic chain of events changed the course of his life and it’s left him traumatised. He is so troubled by what happened that he finds it almost impossible to make sense of it all. Trauma, I think. This feels like it’s happening now. Piece by painful piece he unpacks some of it but not all and I begin to get the picture.
This seems to be the story of a man shocked by what has happened to him. Shocked into a state of panic, a state of disbelief, the state of an emotional emergency. His panic has nowhere to go. He is quite literally, screwed up, in a ball of acute anxiety. I think to myself, how are we going to do this? I’m a relational psychotherapist and have travelled this road before. It’s about going slowly. Interestingly, he starts to slow down anyway. This feels better. Eventually we get to a place of some understanding and I’m in but is he?
A year into the therapy and we’ve made headway with some powerful conversations about acceptance, imperfection and that illusive thing he longs for, a relationship. I sit there thinking, you’re in one. The therapeutic relationship is here. This is where you can experience a different kind of relationship to the ones you’ve had before, I say and he looks at me with curiosity. It’s about experiencing the required relationship instead of the repeated one, I explain.
The change in him is visible. The long body as he allows himself to take up space now. His spontaneous, authentic expression and creativity in describing his experiences to me are more present now than ever. How long has it taken us to get it like this? I say. No more knots, no more ball of anxiety, no more panic, just a man, examining his life and thinking about what’s next.
In his session this evening, we touch on the subject of his experiences with relationships. A recent foray into the dating scene has left him wondering what to do. The thought of what it would be like to fall in love is here. To find that person who would stand beside him and make everything feel better. Then it goes away again, it’s illusive. If only there wasn’t this thing or that thing in my way. He says. These obstacles are the illusion really not the wanted relationship.
We talk about shame and it’s legacy. The way it seems to creep back in years down the line, all dressed up as this or that reason for not doing things. This is the secret armour we wear to protect ourselves from shame. The trouble is that doing things like falling in love, changing career, moving house or anything that gets us closer to what we want means being seen, known, heard and understood probably for the first time.
It’s a huge challenge to become visible, vocal,
validated, viable after a lifetime in the shadows or behind a mask. It’s scarred me. He says. Your scars are beautiful, I say. The invisible scars that are indeed the indelible marks left by trauma, shame, humiliation are what shape us. What you are is all of your experience up until right now. I say. I wouldn’t be who I am without it. He says.
The more I work with people the more I see the inevitable fall from grace that seems to be part of the human experience. I see it as people come in utter disbelief that this could possibly be happening to them. Their righteous indignation, impotent rage, humiliation, terror, trauma. It all needs to find a narrative, be made sense of, understood and registered in another human being.
Mostly, the work is about our development, growth, maturation and coming to terms with it all in the presence of an attuned other. The details are sometimes not important, it’s the wound that is significant. For some, it’s their first and for others one of many. Battle scarred and weary yet open now more than ever, my is client to coming to terms with his story, still unfolding though it is.
As I finish this, I remember some things that have happened to me. Some ancient history and some current affairs, which seem to have a particular pattern, a process that plays out. This is familiar and I realise that it is less about changing that process than it is about accepting it as part of who I am. When I do this work in my practice, I talk to people about archetypes, the Jungian concept that works brilliantly with all of the above.
The indelible mark of shame can be seen as an archetypal pattern that can be interpreted as an expression of the self. This helps develop a sense of oneself with a coherent narrative, an identity, a story, which can be directed more in alignment with what is trying to happen and is often thwarted by our own defences.
I see real progress when people start to accept themselves as they were and then become who they were meant to be, often it’s not who they thought. Maybe they had an inkling and came to therapy to find out. I find this prospect attractive, exciting, daunting, enlivening, scary, illusive, wonderful and illuminating.
That illusive thing my client wants to find is really himself. His own sense of loyalty, love and creativity. His sense of being with himself in a way that he may never have imagined. These were lost back in the storm when all that stuff happened to him. His human spirit was crushed and his internal world scrambled. Through sitting with me for long enough, he is developing a new narrative, one that fits who really he is. It’s the story we tell ourselves that needs changing. This is a transformative experience, a collaboration, a two person job.
This is his unique story. He knows how it goes and how he wants to respond to it. He’s determined to make whatever life throws at him into a profoundly phenomenal and meaningful experience. Shit really does happen and he will be forearmed with his own mind about things. Now he responds to life’s challenges with quiet authority, style, courage, tenderness and grace but most of all with with love.
Every now and then, when another piece of life’s inevitable shit flies my way, I remind myself that I usually manage to send it away, back to where it came from whether it’s a real or imagined. Other times I’m floored. I’m not impervious to these things. It’s part of life and I’m determined, like my client, to make it all part of a phenomenally profound experience. Let it be deep let it be intense because imagine what joy can be found in life’s pleasure if we dare to plumb the depths of the human experience.
Updated: Jan 8, 2024
The title for this came to me in a flash but I didn’t know why. I was about to share a day in my own life, which might reasonably be considered entertaining by some but the lyrics to a song I haven’t heard in decades came to me. It went like this...
“Woke up. Fell out of bed.
Dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up, I noticed I was late...”
This was the start to my day. A day in the life of a psychotherapist. Then I realised, those lyrics belong to the title of my story, A Day in The Life. This is the final track of The Beatles 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. How synchronous. Like my story today.
Today was my first day back at work after a three week break over a quiet, peaceful Christmas period. The first appointment of the day was 8am. The one and only early bird session of the week that I can sensibly offer. I woke up from a dream, in which I was about to discover a truth, to the alarm on my phone. I stumbled but didn’t fall, out of bed, dragged my hands through my rather grown out short hair, made my way downstairs and drank a cup - of tea. Strong. Then I took a quick, as is usually the case, look on social media and was stunned by the news in Australia. I thought to myself, “I read the news today, oh boy.” A line from the Beatles song that is now the parallel for my story today.
The lyric refers to an article John Lennon was reading in The Daily Mail, at the time he wrote the lyrics to A Day in The Life, about the Guinness heir, Tara Browne, who killed himself in a car crash in 1966. The young socialite had been friends with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He reportedly, missed a red light and crashed his Lotus Elan into a lorry, killing him instantly. He was about to inherit his fortune from the Guinness family. ”A lucky man who made the grade” but "Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords." How ironic, these lyrics and idea of this socialite being mistaken for a dignitary. Both are privileged yet hold no power. Time for work.
I realised that like the man in the Beatles song, I had been rudely awoken by the alarm and was running late. Bad hair mornings that begin on the back foot have yet to become a thing of the past. By 11am I was on a coffee break and getting ready for afternoon clinic. In the spaces between clients, I reflect on things while I attend what needs doing around the house. One of the joys of working from home. The lyrics to the song played in my head.
“I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall"
The verse refers to another news article John Lennon had seen while writing this song, about the number of holes in our roads. He takes us from the sublime to the ridiculous. Lennon and McCartney’s collaboration seems to bring two sides of a world view together. One cheery yet ordinary and the other mournful and melancholy but then there's a rebellious streak all the way through. I bet the man who fell out of bed would have loved to go to The Albert Hall, fight for his country, drive a Lotus and turn someone on. I check back on the story.
Five million animals dead in Australia. Burned in the bush. “I just had to look.” Here, John Lennon refers to a war film he was in where "A crowd of people turned away" and in the song he doesn’t, he looks. Like the pictures of the bush fire tragedies, I just had to look, and then I thought, how interesting that an English song writer was inspired by an article about the holes in our roads and how many it would take to fill The Albert Hall. “They had to count them all,” He sang. The news today was about the fires in the Australian bush, the scale of them compared to how many it would take to cover an area the size of Europe and the five million dead creatures that had been counted. A crowd of people turned away, had to run away, from their homes.
Lennon wrote his lyrics in a way that made it possible for the auspicious, the ordinary, the bizarre and the tragic to exist in some kind of musical narrative that McCartney arranged around an orchestral piece that had musicians behaving in unexpected ways. The orchestra was conducted by Paul McCartney and builds to a crescendo, that was supposed be like a musical orgasm, while the musicians wore false noses and all the way through there’s the line “I’d love to turn you on.” I like that line because it was controversial at the time and the BBC banned the song. This is mild by todays standards. I prefer not to read social media news feeds these days because it is so unbelievable and manufactured in a way that irritates me. I don't like the way these things are designed to reel you in. I don’t know what is false or real anymore. I take another quick look.
The video footage of the animals killed in the fires was followed by a political rant about how the Australian government made no provision for the predicted bush fires and a young woman who refused to shake the hand of their prime minister. In the last verse of the song, Lennon refers to the English Army having just won the war. This is a reference to a film in which a young Lennon played the part of Musketeer Gripweed, a bumbling English soldier in a parody of a war film that looks like a piss take of the establishment.
“I just had to laugh.” I could hear Lennon's wistful voice and thought to myself, that young woman made a statement much like Lennon might have done. His tone in the song is not insolent but one of sadness or pity and "Having read the book," he knew what was going on. I watch the video of the song. Those young men look so serious. I feel as if I want to talk to them. The Beatles were a huge part of the antiestablishment counterculture of the time. Interestingly, that was also the age of Aquarius, the 1960's, a summer of love and rebellion. The age of Aquarius is here again. It will be a time of great change but this time it's an inside job.
The first verse feels like the end of the song but the sound of an alarm clock, not meant to be in the original recording was left in because it seemed fitting and takes us to the next part, sung by Paul McCartney. It brings us back from the holes that could fill The Albert Hall into the ordinary, where a man wakes up and falls out of bed. I stumbled out of bed today as my alarm clock woke me. It interrupted my dream about love and redemption. I wanted very much to go back to my dream, where everything was about to turn out right but from the sublime to the tragic, I know how many holes it takes to fill The Albert Hall but I feel wretched about Australia.
A Day in The Life was recorded in January 1967