May 15th, 2025

About secure relationships

I was away for two weeks … without my piano! Within a few days upon returning home the songs of my repertoire came back. The secure relationships I’d nurtured between the harmonic structures and melody lines nestled in together like old friends.
      My vacation also gave me a break from work on the novel. Upon my return, the characters were still there but I saw them in a different light. The premise of the novel has always been on healing from trauma. Acts of respect, understanding and kindness contributed to that healing. What I noticed upon my return was that secure relationship, committed and assertive in maintaining connection, was even more fundamental to the healing of my central character.
      And so, returning to my creative passions, I find solace in reflection on secure relationships, much needed solace given the insecurity presently percolating around us as Canadians.
      As a nation, we’ve experienced a secure relationship being quickly destroyed. The political impetus in USA is no longer on being a supportive neighbour sharing mutual benefit. We’re now dealing with a bully fuelled by economic greed and imperialistic ambition. We don’t know what the future holds for the quality of life for our two countries, we hope eventually a solution can be found. However, given the disrespect and devaluation shown already, our relationship security has been shattered, probably irreparably.
      I learned a lot about secure relationship from my work as a psychologist. Actually, a lot about how it gets screwed up.
      I subscribed to a notion of psychotherapy that focused on the creation of context to facilitate the natural healing process within the mind of the client. I believed the mind was like the skin in its capacity to heal from trauma. 
      But healing works better if supported. Damaged skin needs protection from being torn open again allowing harmful bacteria to get in. Dressings need to be replaced and the wound cleaned out. Systemic support is needed to insure reserves for the internal processes of repair and fighting infection. 
      Recovery of the psyche through the provision of psychotherapy is much the same. Interpersonal and intrapsychic wounds need to be tended and emotional support provided to enhance the resiliency of the person harmed. The therapist needs to know the client really well to select modalities and timing, to find channels of support the client can accept. With taking that time and exercising that care, trust and security develops. Once these are in place healing can emerge, paced at a rate natural for the client.
      This fundamental notion of psychotherapy placed me at odds with the institutions of psychology and mental health: its scientists, regulators and managers. According to them, wellness comes not from within the client but from enacting intervention protocols onto the client, ones that have theoretical and research sanction. It was all about what we did, not what emerges in the client through a secure, sensitive and deeply knowing relationship. 
      For those scientists, regulators and health care managers it doesn’t matter which mental health professional dispenses the protocol, just that the protocol is dispensed.
      Two situations arose toward the end of my career in which clients arrived at their previous mental health agency to be told their therapist was no longer available and another was taking over. Moreover, for both of these clients, it happened repeatedly. Their subsequent therapists could access the documentation of diagnosis and treatment to continue the treatment protocol. However, the result was not further progress but distrust, disillusionment and anger. It took enormous courage for both of those clients to trust again as they entered therapy with me. Once they knew I would safeguard my relationship with them from interference or being externally truncated we were finally able to progress. 
      Secure relationship, even the capacity for those agencies to provide secure relationship, had been broken. The result was harm.
      I accept that skilled practice using proven techniques can be helpful. I was trained on many of those. My contention is that it’s not the only thing, and probably not the most important thing. However, my former profession elevates this one element as the critical component of treatment. Indeed, over the course of my career, it became the ideology of the profession. As an ideology it took on an ethos of unquestionability and irrefutably, hegemonic and confining.
      But ideology has the power to destroy. While ideology can give a sense of purpose, meaning and approaches to problems, it can also harm. Ideological adherence destroys an individual’s capacity to think independently and critically.
      Furthermore, ideology destroys secure relationships. Consider the consumers of social media political bias who become so adamant in their sense of outrage, personal rights and political correctness they alienate themselves from their family members. Consider the faith groups that shun or disfellowship family members through exercising their religious arrogance and petty piety. Healthy families thrive on intergenerational cohesion but dedication to an ideology can destroy those secure relationships.
      By narrowing perspective, ideology acts like horse-blinders. It blocks out contextual and contributing variables in addressing complex issues. For my former profession it devalued the essential human elements of compassion, wisdom, the capacity for sensitive intersubjectivity, creativity, gentleness, the nurturing of secure and supportive relationship, and the valuing of the client as a unique individual. In my practice, those were foundational to effective psychotherapy. 
      Humans are complex beings living in a complex world. Ideological reductionism can’t meet the demands of complexity. It doesn’t do it well in politics, in families nor in the delicate process of encouraging wellness within someone who is emotionally suffering. 
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I recently saw where ideology can lead. I visited the Mauthausen Jewish Concentration Camp in Austria (you might want to google it, but be prepared for an account of the worst humanity has to offer). Viewing that camp was especially poignant given what is happening in a country that used to be our neighbour and now wants to be our possessor.

​Gosh, I need my piano, the solace I find there.