Unusually this punchline comes first: because the science says so. The term talking therapies to describe and perhaps summarise the clinical work and effect of Counselling is unhelpful. To a degree so is the term ‘Counselling’ and I prefer the term ‘Psychotherapy’ which is more accurate in terms of the work and process that goes on between therapist and client: a psychologically therapeutic exchange. The development of Neuroscience over the past 30 years has, in particular, given my profession scientifically proven evidence rather than circumstantial subjective experience that was so easy to undermine or discredit by sceptics. This is the first in a series to explain through experience, evidence and science that not only does Counselling and Psychotherapy work but that in every environment, social, interpersonal, work, home, sporting, and spiritual, understanding each other and why we are how we are will enhance our own lives, the lives of those around us and the environment in which we find ourselves.
ATTACHMENT AND RELATIONSHIP: THE IMPACT OF NEUROSCIENCE
Neuroscience has provided the evidence for the attachment theory approach of John Bowlby widely used by Psychotherapists to understand the impact of early developmental experience on later life behaviours. By the time we are aged 3 between 75%-90% per cent of our brain development has taken place. Prior to Neuroscience too, for example, it was believed until the early nineteen-eighties that once once our brain had finished it’s development it was then not possible to change the brain’s structure. Small wonder that the work of Counsellors and Psychotherapists was not taken sufficiently seriously. What Neuroscience has provided is not only the evidence that brain structure can change but also how we become who we are in the first place.
ATTACHMENT AND RELATIONSHIP: THE NEUROSCIENTIFIC CAUSE AND EFFECT IN A CLIENTS LIFE
The clients that come to see me in my clinical room present what is effectively the accumulation of every moment that they have experienced up to that meeting. The same is true whenever any of us meets anyone. Critically much of the underlying foundations for the assumptions that are drawn from those experiences will have been laid down in those first three years of life. At birth, and in utero, the potential embryonic life can be thought of as a sponge waiting to be filled with experience. The primary instinct is one of fear passed on from our primitive reptilian brain located in the Limbic system. The trillions of neurons contained within our minds and bodies (yes, and bodies) are waiting to be connected by experience and especially to be made to feel safe from that experience. An experience that leaves the developing person with synaptic connections from which they can conclude that they are valued and valuable, that they have worth. Alternatively the the experience can be unhelpful, unsupportive, abusive and the synaptic connections represent a conclusion that the world is unsafe unless some how I learn to make it safe because the world around me is unreliable and untrustworthy: such are they that arrive in my counselling room.
ATTACHMENT AND RELATIONSHIP: THE NEUROSCIENTIFIC CAUSE AND EFFECT IN THE WORK OF THE PSYCHOTHERAPIST
Minds cannot exist in isolation and will have been formed in relationship. As a therapist my work is to give the client a different experience of relationship, a clearer insight of the assumptions and sense that they are able and unable to make of the world around them. The therapist will help the client to make different choices and to help them to become the person they were truly born to be. Often this will mean relocating their world more internally so that it is not terrifying, untrustworthy and threatening. By contrast, the therapeutic room is a safe space: the therapist is a reliable trustworthy adult. In the therapeutic space two minds will meet and will relate. The client will begin to make different assumptions and choices. The especially good news is that in making these different choices the Neuroscientific evidence tells us that the old synaptic pathways that create our unhelpful assumptions will be ‘pruned’ and new helpful ones created based on a different experience of life. In other words change is possible through a meeting of minds in a psychological space.
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