Tag: Carl Rogers

Mentalizing, Mindfulness, and the Drive for Evidence

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

In reading about attachment theory, David Wallin‘s description of Peter Fonagy’s work was intriguing, so I went down that rabbit hole. Fonagy developed Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) to improve emotional regulation, as distinct from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Fonagy sees our mental development as relational, but in order to have empathy for others, we need awareness of our own feelings, which can be helped with mindfulness work. However, in looking at the evidence of efficacy of these separate modalities, I question the attempt, since Freud, to make psychology into a natural science. Each of the various ways to help are useful, but there’s an element of the unknowable in the way when we treat them scientifically. 

According to Wallin, Fonagy’s focus was on developing the understanding of the mental states of others, which he calls mentalizing, to let us understand the depths of ourselves and others. For instance, it can help heal old wounds if we understand that dad’s rejection of us might be due to his depression and not our behaviour as a child. Other people’s reactions to us aren’t just caused by us, but there are always multiple factors at play affecting how people behave. It seems very similar to Theory of Mind. He met Bowby in the 1980s, and studied adults’ behaviour relative to their own descriptions of childhood attachment, and found, when comparing severely deprived to well-connected adults, that a weak attachment was correlated with a weak “reflective functioning” (the ability to understand behaviours in terms of their thoughts, feelings, and mental states). From this, he says psychotherapy should be the “effort to restore or kindle patients’ capacity to mentalize,” to simultaneously feel our feelings and reflect on their meaning. To help people develop mentalizing requires a relationship that mirrors and guides emotional responses. 

His description of mirroring is specific: it must be “contingent and marked.” The reaction has to be accurate and not our own reaction to the other person’s upset, but an empathetic reaction with them. Read more »

Becoming What We Are: Authenticity as a Practice

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

Become what you are, having learned what that is. —Pindar

[To protect their privacy, I have changed identifying details of those mentioned here.]

Aristotle

What do we want for our lives? It’s a peculiarly human question; other animals don’t appear to be worrying about it. I’ve asked myself this question, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes more desperately, for as long as I can remember. I’m always moved when patients raise it in their therapy. A man who retired from a successful career said that when he looks into the future without the mantle of his professional title and status, he feels empty and lost, ashamed that at 70 he doesn’t know what he wants.

Sometimes we raise the question ourselves; sometimes the world raises it for us. Another patient, whose boyfriend just “dumped” her, is wrestling with her alcohol use. The men she wants in her life don’t want an alcoholic in theirs. She’s angry at the thought of sobering up for someone else, “Wouldn’t that be inauthentic?” At the same time, she (authentically) wants a partner in her life.

She knows what most of us know, that we want to be authentic. By “authenticity” I mean living in a way that is true to oneself and to one’s situation in the world. (For the bigger philosophic picture, see my previous column, Reclaiming Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal.) Authenticity resonates because it is that rare thing, an ideal that most of us embrace—despite our divergent religious, ethnic, social, and political values. After all, each of us faces (or not) the question of how to become our best selves.

Although we must ask and answer that question for ourselves, I will suggest a few core principles that can guide our way. I’ll start with Aristotle’s view, that the one thing we all want from life is to flourish, which means living in such a way as to be fulfilling our nature. This might sound about as helpful as telling someone who is struggling, “Just be true to yourself!” How do we even know what our true self is? If we’re a lonely alcoholic, is our true self more of the same, or is it sober and in a relationship?

We can find some guidance by unpacking two principles of flourishing that extend to living authentically. Read more »