Nail-biting days, sleepless nights: you can see it etched on every face in the tube. Most of us have never known a time like this. Every news bulletin announces further massive job losses, and no one knows where the axe will fall next. It’s not just the roof over our heads we worry about; it’s our children’s future, and even our marriages and relationships. A huge question mark hangs over everything we recently considered safe and secure. With money so tight, is this really a good time to invest in a counsellor or psychotherapist?
The common sense answer is an obvious no! A therapist can do nothing to stop the avalanche of the economy. If you need to see a counsellor, best wait until the thaw sets in and incomes are more secure. Meanwhile, fall back on that old British standby, the stiff upper lip. Well yes. And no. A deeply unstable society leaves our defences hugely exposed. Everything we could safely ignore in boom times is suddenly hurled into sharp relief, and it can be quite terrifying - especially in the small hours. Several big financial players have already committed suicide. Without money they felt they were worthless. They defined themselves purely as breadwinners. They were not alone. Money can hide a lot of personal problems.
Our inner worlds are more exposed
A low self-esteem that a good job hid from the world, a recurrent depression that has been painstakingly concealed from friends and colleagues, fears about how we have brought up our children, about the security of our relationships, about never finding love, haunt us as never before. The super rich are not exempt. The so-called ‘cheque-book marriages’, where two high incomes alone kept an unhappy couple together, are on the rocks as soon as one partner is made redundant. Family lawyers are reporting a huge rise in instructions. And now women’s jobs are as much under the axe as men’s. Some think even more. Many employed in finance will never find work in that field again – even when the economy picks up.
Of course I know only too well that psychotherapy is not a form of crisis management. Losing your job or seeing your shares slide is no reason to see a counsellor. Most of us, however, are more aware of our private and long-hidden insecurities and despairs than we were before the recession. Our defences that successfully kept the world out now feel desperately fragile. Many people privately fear some sort of breakdown; and often the last person to know is the one closest to us. We worry that our anxiety may be contagious.
Paradoxically, this might be a good to start when you remember that at the beginning of therapy months can be spent in resisting any exposure of our cherished defences. Those months cost money of course. It’s a curious irony: we go into therapy to change, and then spend much of our time resisting any change whatsoever. Better the devil we know, we think. It’s irrational, but that’s what life has taught us - so far. As for our defences, they were erected in childhood to keep us sane. They were how we survived in our families of origin. Now that we are adults they are sadly redundant. Neurosis is essentially behaviour that is long past its sell-by date. Worse, it is now counter-productive, no longer saving us from disaster but maddeningly inviting it, preventing growth and intimacy. Even so, you may think why not wait until the economy recovers before embarking on a course of counselling? Well yes, but as we all know, when we have no immediate worries, we tend to put things on hold. We tell ourselves we’ll get round to it one of these days – which of course never comes. If that chimes with your own experience, and there are aspects of yourself that have long worried you and are now uppermost in your mind, you can find a counsellor/psychotherapist through the Counselling & Psychotherapy Resources Directory, published by BACP, or of course the Internet.
About the author
Tony Yates is a psychotherapist based in Central London