The Politics of Happiness

Happiness has become big news. Most people pursue happiness: some have a pretty good idea how their happiness can be achieved; others don’t have a clue what makes them happy, knowing only that they are not happy; and there are those who don’t assume happiness is their destiny and are leaving happiness until after they are dead.

Last week the Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced that from April 2011 the Office for National Statistics would be measuring happiness. This mind-boggling task has to be admired: not only does Cameron want to have an idea how the country’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is looking, he would like to have a grasp on how happy British people are. So why does this initiative leave me feel feeling uneasy?

When announcing this initiative Cameron qualified what he was proposing by saying ‘you cannot capture happiness on a spreadsheet’ as well as ‘you cannot reduce happiness to a statistic’. However, he went on to contradict this by claiming that this Index will give ‘a general picture of whether life is improving’ and ‘will help the government work out with evidence the best way to help people’s well being’.

Is it possible for a government to promote happiness? In the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan the government must consider every policy for its impact not only on GDP but GNH (Gross National Happiness): consequently there is no advertising, limited television and no plastic bags. This Shangri-La whose population is less than 900,000 was an absolute monarchy until 2008 when it had its first election. This is a country about to grow up.

Cameron’s initiative also smacks of Victorian philanthropists, such as Titus Salt who had an idea how people could be happy. Alongside his Yorkshire wool mills, Salt built a town with neat houses for the workers, institutes for improving classes, but no pubs.

Both of these utopias rely on a population of submissive people who embrace the idea of someone else working out with evidence the best way to help people’s well being. Whilst I embrace the discussion Cameron has started, can someone who is also balancing the country’s books assess happiness and not interpret the statistics to suit their actions?

Perhaps what makes me most uneasy is that our experiences will be collected, added up and divided out to tell us how happy we are. An index of happiness will move away from the individual to give us a score for collective happiness.  If the score contradicts how we are feeling, this will further our  isolation. If the ‘evidence’ denies the experiences of the marginalised it will exaggerate feelings of being out of step with society and being insignificant.

The state has a duty to provide good health care, security, education and justice – these are the foundations of wellbeing. After that it is up to us to discover what makes us happy: there are as many versions of happiness as there are people in the United Kingdom in 2010. For adults, meaningful happiness is not donated but chosen and earned.

Jane Curzon

Psychotherapist and Counsellor

Regent’s Practice in London W1

www.regentspractice.co.uk

Loneliness

The unflinchingly perceptive piece of cinematic brilliance ‘Another Year’ put me in contact with one of Mike Leigh’s beautifully described bleak themes: the portrait of loneliness and longing through a study of contentment. Less is more seems the way of the main characters, a middle-aged couple called Tom and Geri, apparently living a mundane loving existence. But orbiting around them exists a constellation of less fulfilled and disturbed people sharing the commonality of struggling with their own life expectations.

Throughout our countless ups and downs from birth to death, loneliness may evolve into our best friend who is permanently inviting us to indulge in their company. Loneliness is really seductive as it does not demand us to change and seems always available and understanding without any questioning. It is not then uncommon for people to get used to their own company and start drifting away from others, making less and less effort to try to reconnect with people. Independence and self-fulfilment, encouraged in modern life, can reinforce even more our desire to detach, stay strong and keep moving. This may help to explain the current ‘epidemic of loneliness’ in Britain where one in ten people feel lonely ‘often’ according to the Mental Health Foundation.

‘No time to waste’, as ‘time is money’ seems the lodestone of our unsettling modern existence. Why bother to listen and connect with other people if we have our technological ‘friends’ (particularly phones and computers) at our disposal 24/7. Face-to-face human contact comes a distant second when unlimited possibilities of virtual chatting become possible at any moment. It is almost a vintage scene, for instance, to see friends over lunch, dinner or a drink in public where people are making any effort to really listen to each other and technology seems the perfect buffer.

In fact, mobile phones or social networking sites have been dominating a great part of our social encounters. Attending and listening with loving and caring to others in our lives have been downgraded as rare commodities. Are we then losing our skills or interest to be fully present with others? Or do people simply only want to talk, talk and talk and can’t be bothered to listen too?

It is disturbingly obvious that more technology and less intimate face-to-face human contact may lead to some form of alienation - where loneliness will be welcomed. Even if people are trying madly to virtually connect online, this seems not enough to nurture our need for meaningful relationships. This overwhelming and sometimes unbearable and shameful feeling of loneliness can become the norm and its familiarity comforting. How many times do we need to repeat that ‘it is better to be alone than with bad company,’ or ‘ I am too busy’, trying to justify our lonely journey.

A busy social life, long work hours, alcohol, meditation, shopping, drugs (illicit and prescribed), casual sex and hobbies tend to be our chosen ways to postpone our meeting with our welcoming ‘best friend’ of loneliness. Even solitude chosen by many as a way of life or even a creative process cannot delay forever this creeping meeting with loneliness. It is not to say that togetherness is the only way for stability and contentment, but it is at least half way through this bumpy journey of living and copying with loneliness. As we are ‘imprisoned’ in society, we cannot escape the fact that we are condemned to struggle to learn how to be with other people. A hermit existence is only really possible for imaginary characters in a novel…

So trying to balance our need for intimacy with our need for separateness can become a futile exercise where giving up can be seen as the easiest option. People tend to avoid the subject because of its possible contaminating powers. Nobody wants to look at their own ‘blisters’/ ‘devils’ as long as life works. So when we finally meet loneliness – with its destructive power – life can easily lose its colours and everything can feel hopeless and gloomy. Low self-esteem, feeling guilty and worthless, can set in. Even if the mental health field with all its confusing labels may give some comforting explanation, nothing is able to stop the leaking pain brought by feeling isolated and alone.

Before you start drifting away when loneliness starts eating and hounding at your life, you might consider getting some professional assistance. This is not an easy journey to find how to best deal with our loneliness. One of the answers could be to investigate and try out different ways of reconnecting with our humanness of being with other people. Life is indeed mainly about being open to the possibility of meeting with people. Therapy could be one of the ways that will allow you the space to face one of the greatest dreads of living and hopefully to show you the way forward.

Marco Cortez

Psychotherapist and Superviser

Regent's Practice London

http://www.regentspractice.co.uk/

Aging and Sexual Desire

Freud defined sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life and everything, both good and bad, seems to stem from the expression or repression of our sex drive.

People have since wondered whether there are any other forces at work, but we cannot deny the cutting power of sexual desire. In our modern society, it is not difficult to see the powerful role that sexual desire plays among people of all ages.

It seems that magazines, movies, advertising, fashion or any form of mass communication need to titillate their customers if they want to make big money and be successful. The porn industry is one of the most successful industries for selling this idea – and it makes billions every year.

We could wonder that even if we put sexual desire aside, what we would replace the empty gap with as life seems a constant and sometimes frustrating ‘mating game’, where sexual fantasy consumes a great part of our daily energy.

The big question is: will aging necessarily lead us to better control of our sexual desires?  In most other areas of living we tend to develop some kind of maturity and skills where experience helps us to make ‘better-informed’ choices. Yet for many people sexual desire is like the eternal Sisyphus myth, where every moment could signify a new confusing and repetitive beginning with raw and unsettling emotions.

Aging does not seem to help this ‘controlling sexual desires’ process, as our minds can be very active in creating new sexual fantasies. Even being in a relationship does not mean that you no longer need to struggle with your unfulfilled sexual fantasies. Sexual desire can be seen as a ticking bomb that is waiting to explode and people find different ways of easing the pressure: porn, casual sex, exercise, drugs, alcohol, masturbation, prostitution, shopping, eating.

In fact, these can help temporarily, but sometimes the more long-lasting answers seem to be less clear-cut. Desperation for new sexual encounters could start controlling our lives to the point where our self-beliefs would be put in question. We might start making choices that we would regret greatly in the future as it could be really difficult to find a balance between coping with strong sexual desire and aging with informed choices.

If you have also been struggling to find a more solid answer to this dilemma I would recommend a professional relationship that would allow you to experience a non-judgemental space to explore all the possibilities of aging with dignity and facing the turmoil of sexual desire.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at Regent’s Practice if you live in London or you would like a consultation by Skype.

Marco Cortez

Psychotherapist/Counsellor/Supervisor

Regent’s Practice in London W1

http://www.regentspractice.co.uk/

Broken Heart

Having just finished reading the melancholic novel The Past by Alan Pauls, where the author tries to rethink the laws of love, I have  reconnected with the painful experience of having a so-called ‘broken heart’.

Many of us, like the main character Rimini, face this devastating experience in our journey in living. It is not uncommon then to question ‘What is love” or even worse, ‘How can I carry on without my love?’ What are we to do with photos, money, property, videos and all the future plans that are shattered into pieces?

Self-destruction, addiction, desperation, and loneliness might become flavours of our daily existence where remembering our lost love seems to be like inflicting torture. Friends, and others too, tell us to get over it, to not be so self-obsessed, and move on – advice given without knowing exactly what we are missing. In fact, ‘the sea is full of fish’ is a popular saying that shows up that for many, relationships are seen as commodities. Relationships segue into sex and moving on, as we can’t waste any time with losers, and intimacy is seen as a sign of weakness. We need to be strong, independent and successful!

I have experienced in my life much suffering where life no longer seems to belong to me and to my present but to my past – and with clients in my therapeutic practice. People really can become ghosts of their pasts and life loses its colour. We can be seen as almost dead beings, because of an attachment to a past now gone.

Thinking, imagining, daydreaming about what your ex-lover might be doing at any moment can be a constant living nightmare. Distractions are useful as long as you are able to engage fully in the activity. Arts, exercise, work, addictions seem the most common distractions. Nevertheless, nothing replaces or substitutes for the gap of the missing loved one.

So it seems that learning to live with the pain and the absence constitutes the way forward. If you can still entertain the hope of new loving possibilities you might have a less painful ride.

As psychotherapists at Regents Practice in London we could offer you space and time for you to grieve your loss and help you to reconnect with some hope and meaning of your present and future life.

PS: ‘Jose, Joselito, dorminoquinho … gone but alive...

Marco Cortez

Psychotherapist/Counsellor

Regent’s Practice in London W1

http://www.regentspractice.co.uk/

 

Busy, Stressed and Tired

It seems that ‘busy, stressed and tired’ define most Londoners’ daily existence. And sometimes the thought of ending everything can be quite tempting as the painful cycle will be over forever.

In fact, suicide tends to rise in periods of economic crises, where the pressures can be overwhelming. Josephine King uses her current exhibition at Riflemaker to disclose some meaning to her difficult existence. King uses ink on paper to describe living a manic existence with depression. Suicide seems an alternative, which will stop her suffering - and makes us wonder about what is the point of living too. She also confronts us with strong language – ‘my suicide attempt in December 2005’; ‘slashed my wrists’ – which reveals her as a human being in great despair trying to create enough meaning to carry on living. It made me think that free time, caring and human contact can be more precious than any drugs (prescribed or illegal) as we crave for meaningful connections and love.

Friends, lovers, relatives and strangers are the most obvious people to look to for that caring that we crave, but being busy, stressed and tired tends to be in the way for much of the time. Even the modern way of connecting via constant online communication seems not enough to nurture our need for sharing and being there for others.

Listening seems a rare commodity where people often don’t have the time or patience to be with others unless we are doing business or having sex.

Despair, loneliness, withdrawal, isolation or self-destructive temptations  (drugs, alcohol, gambling) may creep in and take over most of our existence.

The trend is towards less human contact and desperation…

If you can resonate with this cameo of living, I would like to remind you that you are not the only one experiencing this. There are many people on the same journey, but silent desperation often covers over this.

I would suggest a healthier way is to reconnect with people you care about. However, if people around you seem also busy, stressed and tired, maybe a professional connection could shed some light or open new possibilities on your circumstances.

If you live in London, don’t hesitate to contact the counsellors and psychotherapists at Regent’s Practice. We are here to listen and we offer you time to express and the space to start to reconnect to your human existence.

Marco Cortez

Psychotherapist/Counsellor

Regent’s Practice in London W1

http://www.regentspractice.co.uk/

Anorexia and bulimia hitting women in their 30s to 60s

In Saturday’s Guardian it was reported that psychiatrists are seeing more sufferers from anorexia and bulimia in their 30s, 40s, 50s and even 60s. Here's the link to the article.

These are women who are presenting with their first episode of eating disorders that are usually associated with girls in their teenage years. The Guardian article cites reasons such as relationship breakdowns, the menopause, giving birth, children leaving home and the pressure to remain youthful. Looking at that list there appears to be nothing new, nothing that women haven’t weathered over the centuries. So why this increase in late onset eating disorders now?

Both anorexia and bulimia are isolating conditions through which the sufferer slowly communicates his, but usually her, deep- seated unhappiness to their families, friends and the world by how they behave and look. That teenage girls might struggle with how to manage their life changes and feel unable to voice their situation is not so surprising. However, as women get older one might expect they are more secure in being able to communicate an inability to cope.

It appears that despite the fact there are more ways to communicate than ever before - phones, texting, emailing, twittering, facebook, blogging! - some older women are feeling isolated and are not able to express their feelings. For all of these new conduits of communication, some things are not being said. Something is lost and the new technologies cannot replace more traditional ways of being together.

Perhaps what it missing is a time and space to consider emotions with other human beings, an opportunity to be seen and witnessed by others. 

This is something a talking therapy such as counseling or psychotherapy can also offer. As older women face life changes that have always existed along with the newer pressures of our time, it might be worthwhile to take stock and discuss how they are managing their transitions.

Jane Curzon

Psychotherapist and counsellor

Regents Practice in London W1

www.regentspractice.co.uk