This is the cost of back to the grindstone, leaving play behind!!!

Welcome to ‘my return to work’ Autumn newsletter.
We have book reviews, news, events, podcasts and research bites and writing news.
Please send me book recommendations, or upcoming events or any ideas, and definitely jokes, and feel free to be in touch about anything. I try to always reply, even if it can take a little time.
I have been feeling mixed about the return to work and real life. Every summer holiday that ends feels poignant and makes me even more aware of life’s transience.
My natural ingrained response is then to speed up, try to do more, fit more in, and do it all faster! There is also another pull, a healthier one, which is to slow right down, do less, and do it more mindfully, actually take life in. For me its a kind of battle. As I feel time passing, I feel a need to do things before its too late, travel, explore, write, challenge myself, yet this and my rushy somewhat ADHD activity levels get in the way of being in the moments I am living in before they disappear. Its all too easy to miss those glimmers that i wrote about last month, Pablo Neruda’s poem below captures something of this.
For me the theme that brings together these two horns of this dilemma, speeding up or slowing down, is in developing a more mindful present approach, which in the words of classic mindfulness means developing a beginner’s mind. Those of us who work with children, in fact adults too, are often appreciative of moments when someone opens up to awe and excitement in the unknown. The opposite of course is doing things out of habit, unthinkingly, what is often called automatic pilot.
I once again was diving into the work of Ellen Langer who, with her own definition of mindfulness, has really challenged us to look outside our usual boxes. One of her most famous studies was the Counter clockwise experiments in which she took a bunch of men in their late 70’s and immersed them in a space based on life 20 years before, when they were in their prime, decorated in those styles, with similar music, tv programs, chairs literature, no mirrors but only pictures of young men. Amazingly, compared to a control group and their selves before the experiment, they sat taller, were more supple, more dexterous, their hearing and even eyesight improved. The important bit was that they were asked to think back to when they were younger.
Langer has described multiple experiments showing how huge changes can occur if we think outside the box. Central is being open and curious and not closed down, indeed developing a beginner’s mind.
I recently saw the brilliant Mark Rylance in the play about Dr Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who discovered that deaths in hospitals were too often caused by passing on germs. At that time doctors coming fresh from the mortuary would assist in labours without handwashing and lots of women and babies died. The problem was that Semmelweis was not believed and he faced terrible antagonism, eventually dying in an insane asylum. Countless further deaths occurred in the years before the medical profession at last began to take his ideas seriously.

I often think of the similarities with the field of psychotherapy that I and many of you readers work in, and how much we cling to what we were taught, to feeling we know, and how scary it can be for any of us to embrace uncertainty and think outside the box. Bowlby especially comes to mind. Treated as a pariah for a long time but in daring to trust his own judgements and instincts he opened up the field dramatically. The question i have to ask myself in returning to work, and I am sure many of you will too, is, as Bion would exhort, dare we meet our patients and colleagues with interest, curiosity and uncertainty and be prepared to be surprised and challenged. As George Bernard Shaw is reported as saying, ‘we dont stop playing because we get old, we get old because we stop playing’. Now that’s a sentiment Ellen Langer would approve of!

New Beginnings

Baby owls captured on film by neighbours who put a box above their barn in Kent and these are the result. New life, this might look sweet and fluffy, but in fact the adult owls killed jackdaws to take the box, so as we know life is not all love and kindness!

Writing

I am starting on some short guides based on some of the research in Nurturing Natures. I am starting with one on Prenatal Life and Birth. PLEASE share any stories you have as clinicians or personal ones, they can be confidential, such as about prenatal bonding or what happened to you and what helped and what didnt??? You can reply to this email

Margate at sunset with oyster beds in the background…. a few weeks past and now the moment and holiday has passed but this was definitely a proper glimmer

Free download

Brainy Kids Skating on Thin Ice: New Thoughts on Psyche-Soma and How Minds Over-Develop to Cope with Trauma

This months download (first 50 are free) is a recently published article in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. In it I build on Winnicott’s ideas on mind and its relation to the Psyche-Soma and tries to integrate this thinking with ideas in Respark about trauma, anxiety and the role of embodied awareness in the therapist and the use of somatic awareness and signalling.

Do check out the rest of the edition which has some brilliant papers in it, and other volumes https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/upsc20

… yes the harvest is in.. i always feel sad when the summer is nearly over

RIP Parky. His shows were such a memorable part of my generation’s growing up, some classics in this clip, even if watching it is proof i often had nothing exciting to do on a Saturday night

Upcoming talks or events

I am doing less events but a few to keep an eye out .. in the next month there is the below (and do though send in information about other events as I am less in the loop at the moment but like to advertise other organisation’s events)

22nd September, The predictive brain, attachment and trauma: A day for Adoption Plus online about how early experiences lead to some of the issues we end up working with later book here

27th September Anne Alvarez legacy interview for MINDinMIND: They have had some brilliant therapists already but to my mind Anne is a true leading light and inspiration. Cant wait and I will be joining as one of her guests details here

9th-12th October, The Compassionate Mind Conference: I am excited to be doing both a keynote and a full day’s workshop at the Compassionate Mind Foundation Annual Conference booking and details here

26th/28th September, Respark: 2 evening talks for CPDcourse Online, a South African cpd organisation who have great things. not advertised yet but keep a look out hereSome of my other future events can be found here

More nature and new life .. I put a bird box out to feed birds and a pair of doves were sitting on eggs in it the whole summer holiday. The male and female take it in turns and are so impressively diligent, Bowlby would be pleased

A blog to enjoy

‘RESPARK’ is available in audible format here and on Spotify and many other platforms

The physical book and ebook is available from amazon or better, independent bookshops eg psychological therapy books and the reincarnated Karnac books here, yay!

Please do leave a review anywhere you buy it, it helps a lot
Affect and Emotion (the new edition) is available here on amazon … or psychological therapy books …. only about 6 quid too!

Click on links below to view or buy these:
Nurturing Natures,
Affect and Emotion
Nurturing Children,
The Good Life,
From Trauma to Harming others

For other journal papers and chapters papers and chapters see here

A few recently read books recommended

Firstly a few novels read over the summer that brought a tear to my eyes

Tomorrow tomorrow Tomorrow. Gabrielle Zevin : I
I really enjoyed this novel. The unlikely subject is gaming, but it is a tender story of love, friendship, coming of age, culture, life’s challenges and the gaming bit is the vehicle. Its over 60,000 amazon ratings suggest others loved it too. and yes i cried!

Get here

Trespasses, Louise Kennedy
A beautifully touching novel, a love story again (well its love that keeps us reading and living!) , set in the troubles in Northern Ireland, full of history too, but wonderful characters. Another amazing book for a first novel, the list of accolades is testament enough. And of course it had me in tears to, my main benchmark!

.. see here

A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman: A surprising novel which i hesitated to include as i did not get into it at first. A surly Swedish man of another generation and his story of loss, depression and what happens, no spoilers. Anyway it became a famous film and it passed the crying benchmark test for me and got me in the end see here Apparently a Hollywood film now too

John Sarno: The Divided Mind and The Mind Body Prescription are 2 of his books in which he uses classic psychoanalytic ideas to argue that many psychosomatic issues, especially back pain, can be linked back to unconscious conflict. Like in ISTDP the way to heal is by being with the feeling, especially anger
eg here

Here also is a trailer for a film which describes his method

She might not have been everyone’s cup of tea but Sinead O’Connor’s death affected me, all the more so when I read and listened to her memoir, which was in turn, beautiful, painful and the honest account of a woman who knew she was troubled and yet tried to be true to herself see here

Below is a young innocent beautiful Sinead singing In This Heart ..and if this doesnt touch you , well..

This month’s poem by Pablo Neruda, simple and captures how stopping the rush, allowing glimmers and slowing can open up the world

Extravagaria (Pablo Neruda)
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves
with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead in winter
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

A few interesting podcasts for the holiday

Ellen Langer: As mentioned in the blog, an example of her thinking about the power of a mindful attitude and the mind listen here
Adam Philips in conversation with Josh Cohen: Good free associative conversation about writing and so much more listen here

Slavoj Žižek : Wokeness, psychoanalysis and quantum mechanics .. what more could you want? listen here

A picture by Adam Goren, child psychotherapist, of the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco that has just suffered a terrible earthquake, plus photo from when I was there, so beautiful, and so sad what has just happened, (below one of Adam with me in Kent but is he diving, standing or squatting?)

A few research bites posted on X

Nepotism time.. my daughter singing, check her out here on Spotify

And finally …
Come on guys .. no jokes sent in months.. nearly run out
3 corny ones from the Edinburgh fringe:
Getting mythology wrong is my Hercules ankle
‘Hedgehogs – why can’t they just share the hedge?’

“I’ve given up asking rhetorical questions. What’s the point?

That’s it! Thanks for reading everyone