Uncategorized Archives - Seaglass Clinical Consulting

5 March 20215 March 2021

Animals: grief, loss and healing

The grief associated with the loss of a favourite pet can be overwhelming. TheraTails offers a safe space to help the healing process.

For so many of us, our animals were our only living source of warmth and love during lockdown. Screen interactions may have helped us to maintain contact with friends and family but they also reminded us that we couldn’t hug, or touch. Animals became the only providers of physical support and closeness.

Attachment to animals is a strange thing, at once simple and complex. We often value these relationships just because they are so straightforward. They aren’t clouded with moods, expectations, suspicions; pets don’t play games or cut off contact; they don’t say one thing and mean the opposite. For those of us who become overwhelmed or overstimulated by other people, animals are a respite.

But beyond the happy daily round of love and food, our mutual dependency deepens. For our animals, we are the sun, moon and stars. My cats think I can turn off the rain and they get annoyed with me when I don’t. In turn, we project our most desired qualities onto our pets (so cute! so loving!) or maybe things we don’t like so much in ourselves but can find sweet and quirky at a distance (so chunky! so anxious!).

Over time, we entwine ourselves together with our animals and they become a sort of mirror self, reflecting back our own emotions and helping us manage and contain them. For some, the unconditional regard our pets offer us is something they always wanted and never had as children. For others, animals replace a much-loved partner or parent, or hold memories of a special person. The relationship is profound; and so can be the sense of loss when an animal is gone.

Grief and Loss

Anecdotally, I had heard of the trauma around the last trip to the vets; and what psychologists call complicated grief around the death of an animal, the sense of loss that is mixed up with pain and anger and seems to endure and worsen rather than get better with time. It can seem like the emotional pain will never end.

TheraTails Support Group

I currently provide clinical oversight of TheraTails which is run in partnership with the SPCA. We have noticed that those who work and volunteer at the SPCA are often exposed to the sharp end of separation and loss. They have felt helpless and despairing both for the animals and for the humans they encounter. After discussion with my co-therapists, we decided there was a need for a group that addressed the issue of animal loss and bereavement. Like all trauma, the attitudes of those around you can reopen the wound: people are told to “just get another pet,” as if loved ones can be easily replaced; or are made to feel that their sorrow is excessive, or strange.

Through TheraTails we will be running a pilot group once a week at the SPCA, free of charge. The group will help people process and find support around experiences of losing an animal. We will also provide a one-off individual session if needed. We are open to all referrals but we hope to prioritise those who depend greatly on their animals; those who are perhaps more isolated or alone; or those who would hesitate to access therapy in the ordinary way, maybe for financial or cultural reasons.

If you are interested in learning more, for yourself or for someone you know, please contact us via Facebook or email events@spca.bm

3 July 20203 July 2020

The Biggest Bluff (Book Review)

I’ve just read this new release by Maria Konnikova. She’s a Russian-American author who specialises in accessible writing about cognitive psychology. Her last book, The Confidence Game, was about cons and scams; what makes us susceptible and how our cognitive biases can be used against us.

In her new book, Ms. Konnikova dissects the nature of chance and the role of skill using the game of poker as the crucible. After a run of misfortune in her personal life, she decided to study poker to find out exactly what she could control and what she could not.

This book has received a good deal of media attention because the author went from complete novice to tournament pro in a year, winning thousands of dollars to date.

Maria Konnikova has an appealing, confiding prose style and she weaves in complicated ideas so they become rooted in the real world. As she describes her journey, she discusses life traps like overconfidence, social conditioning, magical thinking and, most of all, the failure to pay attention. She introduces many ideas about how we perceive and process the world – the Gambler’s Fallacy, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the locus of control – and describes the studies that back them up.

This book illustrates how one person found a way out of the narrow oubliette of her own automatic thinking. The intention is to help others do the same. This is a useful read if your imaginings about fate, or risk, or your worries about the future hold you back from making effective decisions in your everyday life.

You can find it on Amazon here.

26 April 202027 April 2020

TheraTails: Animals for therapy right here, right now

Shelters all over the world have seen a rise in animal adoptions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Why? This article outlines some of the reasons: emotional support, the need for touch and the desire to care for another creature. All of these are especially valuable when we’re in isolation. Interacting with an animal can help with anxiety, lowering your heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels while increasing your feel-good dopamine.

The TheraTails Program, supported by Third Point Re and run jointly by Seaglass Clinical Consulting and the Bermuda SPCA, builds on these benefits by incorporating animals into psychotherapy. We’ve seen, at first-hand, the therapeutic power of working with animals.

We combine clinical expertise with behavioural knowledge in a multidisciplinary team approach. A clinical psychologist and an animal specialist are both present throughout each session. As well as animal-assisted psychotherapy (AAP), which takes place with the dogs and cats, rabbits and rodents of the SPCA shelter, we also practice the international gold standard for Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy (EAP), the Eagala model, with our certified Eagala practitioner (read about our experiences at a recent conference here). As we use shelter animals, we can tap in to narratives of loss, abandonment, re-parenting and reparation with our clients.

What does a session look like? First of all, our clinical psychologist performs the triage and assessment in-office, and will explain to the client exactly what to expect. We then move to the shelter. The client is introduced to our co-therapist and asked to choose an animal or animals to work with – this often brings up the interesting discussions. Depending on the client’s needs, we then work with the animals actively or more mindfully.

For the more active therapies, socialising or training animals, the client experiences a sense of agency, an immediacy of connection and the buzz of collaborative achievement. In other, quieter sessions the focus is on the animal and our observations; we are all in the present, using the safe space for reflection or simply silent acceptance.

The Eagala sessions with our therapy horse are a paradox; while they sometimes seem calm and uneventful, there is a lot going on under the surface. During the Eagala sessions the team and the client have had insights that many sessions of more conventional therapy have failed to elicit; it is very a powerful catalyst.

If you would like to learn about the process in more detail, and have a look at our qualifications and training, please see our TheraTails brochure here. Now, we also have a TheraTails Instagram where we offer snapshots of how and why AAP and EAP work; and what it might feel like to experience a session.

Due to the current situation we have now started to use a telehealth approach, offering an approximate experience of being with animals however we can. We have just run our first tele-AAP sessions and have some creative ideas gleaned from our Eagala Network for the EAP. Contact us to find out more.

How about you and your pet, right now, at home? Well, there has been some interesting research about the ‘mirroring’ function of animal companions, and how closely they are identified with the self. This means that when you stroke, soothe and comfort an anxious animal, you are nurturing part of yourself. It is a cycle: as the animal relaxes, you too will experience a shift in your internal state. Being with your animal companion is an effective first step in managing and overcoming your anxiety.

19 April 202026 April 2020

Transforming Therapy through Horses: Reflections on the Eagala 20/20 Conference

Watching sessions in the arena, I was struck by the tremendous energy, both physical and emotional, that was unleashed. At first, I didn’t really grasp what was happening. There was a lot of movement among the horses, some gentle commentary and suddenly the volunteer ‘clients’ were talking excitedly, unable to contain their feelings. Something amazing had taken place.

Eagala is the global standard model for equine-assisted psychotherapy (EAP). Following a period of training, I have been providing this powerful form of therapy for a number of months, along with colleagues at the Bermuda SPCA. I work within a close-knit team which includes myself, the Equine Specialist, Kate, and our therapy horse. We have been struck by the speed and immediacy of the work. Often, I have learned more about a person in one session of EAP than I have done in weeks of talking therapy.

EAP works through projective energy. The herd are highly sensitive and attuned to humans and in turn, the humans project powerfully onto the herd. All this is mediated through the team, who gently encourage and allow the session to develop with as little interference as possible. Clients often use objects such as buckets or rods to create structures in the arena, while the team draw attention to the way humans and animals interact and perform.

At the end of February I spent three days in Lexington, Kentucky attending the 20th anniversary Eagala conference. What I saw in Kentucky were demonstration sessions, using coaching goals with volunteer clients. This was to avoid the depth and exposure of real therapeutic work. Yet in these supposedly ‘superficial’ sessions people experienced profound shifts in thinking. We watched a volunteer make a connection with one particular horse, then build a caged structure to contain her ‘goals’. The horse she had chosen persistently nudged aside her rigid barriers, freeing her ‘goals’ one by one. Equally moving was watching the fast, agitated circular movement of a group of horses suddenly stilled when the humans in the arena knelt down, reached inside themselves and quieted their own anxiety. Again, while it was striking simply to watch, it seemed that the people actually interacting with the horses were experiencing something deeply stirring.

Having witnessed EAP in action, I am even more inspired to further develop this therapy on island. If you know of someone who may benefit from this type of therapy then please contact us today to discuss further.

UPDATE: Along with our Eagala networks and trainers, we have been exploring ways of offering EAP as a telehealth option. We have attended some sessions and the modality looks promising. Again, please do get in touch if you are interested.

11 October 20196 December 2019

Burnout and the loss of the self

Millennials, gig economy workers and corporate high-flyers are all suffering from burnout, but mounting overtime is not the only culprit.

The term ‘burnout’ is fairly loose; different people make different associations. I think of it as disconnection, exhaustion and cynicism. This article begins to examine some of the factors that might contribute to this state and the feeling of being out-of-control is key. Not out-of-control in an exciting, freefall, chaos-creating kind of way; rather, the sense that you are passive, without choices. You have no agency.

Agency is an incredibly important term in positive psychology. One of the very first things we learn as children is that we can act upon the world and affect it in some way; if we push a ball or grasp a block, IT MOVES. This sounds so simple but it is the first step to seeing yourself as a separate and complete person with an identity and a will to change. If you are in a work environment where, effectively, you push and push at a ball and it never moves, it erodes your most basic sense of who you are. When that happens, you become disconnected from yourself: and you disconnect from others. The way you relate becomes rote, less satisfying, rushed and suffused with guilt and obligation rather than with pleasure.

If your attempts to shape your own workflow and output are repeatedly blocked or overruled, you stop trying. You feel resentful, and the cynicism sets in, an allowable form of low-level passive-aggressive anger that does not result in you exploding and losing your livelihood. You begin to feel useless and deskilled. You stop questioning the meaningless admin noise and begin to feel that you don’t have the ability or motivation to do very much else. Trying something different, getting out, getting interviews, just seems exhausting.

This is a crucible for feelings of low mood and anxiety. About 50 years ago, Martin Seligman proposed the theory of ‘learned helplessness‘ and depression. In attachment and mentalisation research, connection and relating is seen as the key component for mental health. Meaninglessness, the sense that nothing you do matters, is a frightening and dangerous feeling that existential psychotherapy (and most other forms of therapy!) seeks to ameliorate.

So if you are feeling fed up with your job, clock-watching, completing tasks in a desultory way and generally feeling like you don’t care, take a moment to think about agency and helplessness. It is the responsibility of the management to help you feel like you make a difference in the work world. If your company does not do this, and you think it has little capacity for change, maybe you are better out than in. It might be the first real, life-affirming decision you have taken in a long time.