Susie Orbach: in therapy, everyone wants to talk about Brexit

[BlueMTexpat]

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/jul/01/susie-orbach-in-therapy-everyone-wants-to-talk-about-brexit?CMP=fb_gu

The psychotherapist has been dealing with people’s emotional responses to Brexit in her therapy room. There is fury, uncertainty and anxiety. Now, she says, we need to address the divisions in a emotionally literate way

We are a week in, and every therapy session has started with Brexit. They’ve stayed with it, too. The shock, the fear, the dismay, the feelings of shame, of being unsafe, of being misplaced and unwanted. Notions of what the UK has stood for in people’s consciousness are being shredded. The vote experienced as an assault on senses of self, of identity and community that people didn’t know they carried inside of them and relied upon until the vote shattered it.

People express anger and despair. The image of where they lived, and what the country has meant to them, is pushing them to consider what kind of fantasy they (and, of course, many of us) have lived with until it came crashing down a week ago. Were they delusional, some ask, to not see the level of alienation and despair that has gripped so much of the country? Were they living in a fairytale in which despite the woes of the last years, it all works out in the end? Were they themselves complicit in a make-believe in which politicians can kick the EU and then expect people to support it? Has Britain become the kind of family in which one side is not talking to the other? There is too, a dirtiness, a sense of having cleaved to an alliance with people they didn’t necessarily like while disdaining the political rhetoric of the other side. Yes, these are Remainers, for the most part. But lest you wonder, my practice is metropolitan, cosmopolitan, London-based, but it isn’t essentially middle-class or Guardian-reading.

The alienations and sorrows that drove people to therapy in the first place are writ large in Brexit. Questions of insecurity and belonging are uppermost; do I have a place, do we have a place, how unbearable that others don’t feel they have a place. These sentiments from the consulting room include a concern for self, rage and worry, mixed with concern for those on the other side. For some, the same psychological factors that led them to disown or split off unwelcome parts of themselves, or to repress them or project them on to others, rebound in Brexit darkness. A few have said: there are parts of myself that I don’t want to know about, and there are parts of my country (or the country) I live in that are showing me a darkness I would rather suppress.

In this sense, Brexit, with its foreboding of irreversibility (although who knows on that one), has brought people into a confrontation with self, with helplessness. For some, there has been the expression of a desire to act, to be counted in a more profound way. Equally, there is fright and consternation about a racism now given oxygen. The barely visible, the shadow, is being seen and it is unwelcome. It has released a shockwave as people recognise that the political really is the personal, and that what is personal – what counts as a response to alienation in some of the Brexiters – is the ugliness of othering the foreign, the newly arrived, the people who are displaced from home. The starkness of this recognition, in the taunts and daubings and attacks that show a fear of the other, are sobering and scary. It hurts to know how powerful and how close to the surface such feelings are, and it is crucial that we contest the underlying terms of a political debate in which racism is acceptable expression of powerlessness. By contrast, it has shocked people to see the nakedness of political power, the House of Cards moves played out in plain view as though politics were a game, even a playpen, with leadership, stewardship and inclusivity barely on the table.

[virgogal]

1. These are the people that coped so well during WWII. Good lord,what happened to them?

[Ghost Dog]

3. Well, in the '20s and '30s many British toffs favoured fascism

Mussolini- then Nazi-style, over the alternatives.

Then, as probably now.

[mainer]

4. They were united against a common enemy

Now they can't agree who "the enemy" is.

[Denzil_DC]

5. I think there was a lot of very serious mental distress during and after the war,

much of it never diagnosed or treated.

Heck, I've looked back at some of the unpredictable and sometimes irrationally violent behaviour of some of my teachers at school who served in the war and suspected that they might be suffering from undiagnosed/untreated PTSD. I include my dad in that.

[OnDoutside]

6. Ultimately the 2nd World War in 20 years bankrupted them, and while the Marshall plan rebuilt their

enemies economies, Britain was left behind. That has always stuck with them, and there's an innate resentment towards Europe, "we saved your ass and what thanks did we get for it ?" That mentality has held many of them back, certainly on the UK right and it's split the Conservatives since the 1972 entry into the EEC. It's such a pity because the UK at its best can be a force for good within the EU, and that balance is going to be lost, if they trigger article 50.

[roamer65]

7. Yes. A lot of this is spillover from WW2.

They still don't trust the Germans and I can't say I blame them on that point.

[OnDoutside]

8. The British acted as a bullwark against some of the worst excesses of the Germans and the French,

and it's the EU's loss as a whole, that they are going. However, they have also been a running sore themselves, so a bit of perspective is needed.

[edhopper]

2. This is not

their finest hour.