This weblog carries information on Steve Thorp's work, writing and reflections on wellbeing, creativity and psychology. Telephone Steve on 07949553029, or email him at: info@lifescape.org.uk.

February practice and project update

by on 01/25/2012 | 0

Twitter - @stevethorp1  Tumblr blog - psycho-bubble  Poetry - editions poetry

February 2012 : My practice in Pembrokeshire is now open and a few appointments are available to start with on Thursdays. Spaces are limited at the moment so please contact me as soon as possible if you’d like to take one of these appointments. Information on my therapy and couple counselling and integral coaching can be found on the tabs above.

I am also available for organisational work and speaking engagements, so please contact me for details. I’m in the final phase of completing a new book – entitled Coming Back to Life – which will be published as an e-book and a soft-cover edition later in the 2012. In the meantime you can get a flavour of it at my psycho-bubble blog, and this month’s post on this site is an exclusive extract of one of the key chapters from the early part of the book. It follows on from last month’s post, so I hope you enjoy it.

Please do contact me if you’re interested in the book and my other projects this year, please get in touch me via the contacts page or email me at: info@lifescape.org.uk

An integration 

extract from Coming Back to Life to be published 2012.

An integration of imperatives demands a new psychology – inherent with contradictions, but whole nonetheless. Determinism (‘this led to that’) of any kind just won’t do; moreover, pursuing activism or change without the psychological corollary is dangerous.

The trouble is that for a mind that likes order and certainty, there is always this point of view or the other. For this mind, depression must be the opposite of happiness, socialism is always in opposition to conservatism. For this mind, materialism and science oppose spirit, sanity counteracts madness, freedom stands against responsibility. We deny global warming or accept it, believe in a God or reject it.

This is a world of taking sides and stances; finding positions that must then be defended, regardless of evidence or the likelihood that sometimes contradictory positions can hold truth of a kind. So all psychological positions might be essential to a movement such as this. There can be little room for clinical simplicities and the pretence that we should be happy with the state that we are in; yet, there is always a place for helping people reduce felt pain and dysfunction, as long as this also involves understand, facing and knowing its source. And we might be taking a stand against happiness and sanity – at least in their shallower and most habitual forms!

The psychology of the soul imperative is one of depth, authenticity and calling. It has a phenomenology of watchfulness and subtlety, it is about the long-haul rather than the short-term. Politics and ecology, on the other hand, carry calls to action: a material activism of mind, body and earth. Here we might need honesty and hard thinking – even anger.

(more…)

Coming back to life – a short manifesto for soulful living

by on 01/04/2012 | 0

“This is not a time to live without a practice. It is a time when all of us will need the most faithful self-generated enthusiasm … in order to survive in human fashion” – Alice Walker.

The earth is resilient and bountiful, but oblivious to our individual and collective wellbeing. We owe it  wonder and stewardship – though not sentimentalisation and spiritualisation. For we are in danger of generating myths and miracles just at a time when clear heads and loving hearts are required. We are moral beings by evolution (not by design or belief) and are more than capable of making the right decisions  – if we wake up and stop searching in the wrong places.

To come back to life means going into the shadows and back again. It involves recognising and naming the social forces that create inequalities and that curb human liberty and fulfilment. And it means taking a stand against the evasions and ‘mumbo jumbo’ of post-modernist, post-rationalist culture. And it means shifting our perspectives towards the natural world so that our lives are more in step with its rhythms.

Movements tend to focus on one aspect or other. What is needed is an integral approach that incorporates all wisdoms and imperatives.  Politics, psychology, soul, ecology, economics, humanism, science, art, poetry and new stories of our humanity. All should be enfolded in a multi-dimensional activism. Then new integral practices can emerge with soul, integrity and bite…! The challenge is to craft a new movement. One which does not shy away from the shadows; one that integrates these interconnected imperatives:

First, and fundamentally, the soul’s psychological imperative - the need for us to to know ourselves, to be fulfilled in our work, be rich in our connections and live our inner life deeply and imaginatively;

Second, and most urgently, the ecological imperative, demanding of us a committed re-connection – rational, hard-headed, wondrous and spirited – to our planet, its wilderness and fellow inhabitants.

Third, the economic imperative to find new economic paradigms that are “good for people, society and the natural world”, and new definitions of how we measure ‘wealth’ – what Umair Haque terms betterness rather than business.

Fourth, the political imperatives of equality, liberty and fraternity, without which there will be no end to human conflict; and which includes new ways of defining democracy and re-establishing the social contract between people and ‘government’;

Meeting these imperatives – psychological, ecological, economic and political – requires us to build, from deep foundations, a new way of thinking about the human soul. This metaphorical, imaginative imperative draws on the experiences of those who live in the borderlands; recognising that poetry, economics, science, politics and spirit – all emerge from the same animal mind.

If you’re interested in the challenges facing the twenty-first century soul – and want to explore these ideas further with me and others – please get in touch!! 

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Dangerous words

by on 11/30/2011 | 0

Twitter - @stevethorp1  Tumblr blog - psycho-bubble  Poetry - editions poetry

December news: Plans are progressing for some new initiatives in 2012. In the meantime I’m continuing with my integral therapy and consultancy work.

In Banbury, I will have a couple of vacancies on Tuesday mornings for individual or couple therapy from January 2012. Please contact me if you are interested in taking a weekly or fortnightly slot.

You’ll also find new posts on my psycho-bubble blog every couple of days so feel free to have a browse around: ‘Enter it with the intention of thinking and of hearing new words and combinations.  Emerge a little wiser and return again soon’.

My main post is a tribute to James Hillman who died on October 27th this year. His work on the modern soul will ripple out for many decades.

 

The dangerous words of James Hillman

Words are dangerous, only if they carry truth that people don’t want to hear. The best of these cut through the obscuring fogs of cultural decline and denial. The most effective face the reader and listener with the mirror’s reflection – and then challenge us to conjure beauty from this stark glass. Such was the nature of the words of James Hillman who died last month. Nothing he wrote was a compromise. His message carried difficult and dangerous beauty, running counter to the assumptions of our clinical paradigms of psychology and development, and our culture of markets and quick fixes.He championed the imagination and reclaimed the soul as a living destiny that is both within and outside us all. We are contained within soul; grow up from its acorn; reach down into the rich loam of the world.

His was a world of myths and stories, metaphors and wildness. His was a psychology concerned, not with self, but with the facets of soul, imagination and human creativity that are buried deep; rooted in a world of mystery. He is dangerous because he champions depth and shadow precisely at a time when our shallow culture keeps wanting to fly to the sun… (more…)

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The happiness dilemma

by on 11/17/2011 | 6

Twitter - @stevethorp1  Tumblr blog - psycho-bubble  Poetry - editions poetry
November news: Greetings from Pembrokeshire! I’ve made some changes to my website and blog – and you’ll find information and some exciting news of future projects by clicking HERE. Meanwhile please feel free to browse my psycho-bubble blog which is updated every couple of days and carries new poems and short pieces on a range of themes – “psychology and words we don’t often think”.

The Happiness Dilemma

I am suspicious of happiness. This might be a surprising thing for a therapist to write, so let me explain.

The world we live in is a difficult place. Life – day to day – is a struggle, and this is no different for humans than for the other species on our planet. What is different is that we humans have created cultures and civilisations, that pretend we are special , and depend on making the rest of the planet a massive resource bank from which to make our stuff.

Yet, the thing we call culture, is just a set of expectations that not even we humans agree upon. So we lose ourselves in mutual misunderstanding and fight each other. The rules of our ‘civilisation’ are that we must be loyal to our ‘nation’, and reject others’ ways of life as being ‘undemocratic’ or ‘barbaric’. We define ’us’from within, and ‘them’ by their non-acceptance our ‘our’ norms. And OUR norms seem mostly to be about sex, fighting and shopping. Or they are about markets (what sells) and defence – which amount to the same thing. What this creates is inequality, exploitation and an avoidance of the stark truth that we cannot, any longer, treat each other and our planet as commodities. (more…)

Ordinary times

by on 09/25/2011 | 0

On one level this feels like a very ordinary time. The early Autumn weather in Pembrokeshire is brisk and damp but still balmy – the seas still warm. The summer walks on the beach and the headlands have embedded me here – helping me take root in this place I have chosen to live. We drive over the hills to the gym and the sea unfolds as we approach Fishguard. We shop when we need to, and I cut wood to feed the fire. It feels simpler, somehow, yet I am aware that behind all this the storm clouds loom.

Pembrokeshire in Winter is especially stormy, and that is it’s charm. We know that Spring will come and the flowers will be out on the headlands again in May. Yet the storm that is brewing behind this simpler, chosen life is the hurricane we are all facing, and when it hits there may be no calm and mellow rebirth to follow.

Simply put, we all know in our bones that the consumerist lifestyle we are encouraged to live in order to prop up capitalism is unsustainable. According to nearly all the establishment voices out there, economic growth is still the key; yet this is not true. It cannot be sustained. And this fact makes our lives far from ordinary.

And what have been the psychological implications of this drive towards global consumerism? Fragmented communities. Disconnected individuals, desperately striving to pay for more ‘stuff’. Frantic searches for salvation – whether through the old religions of the new-age ‘faiths’ of spirit and individual transformation. (more…)

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Psycho-bubble – Psychology & words we don’t always think.

by on 09/06/2011 | 0

Just a quick post to tell you about my new mini-blog – Psycho-bubble. I’ll be posting short provocative pieces, poems and quotes. Here’s what its ABOUT:

“There are places in the world where you can burrow beneath the sand. Converse with the small creatures that inhabit these places and share their cold, dark habitat. You will be incorporated into their world. And when you emerge at low tide your words and thoughts will have been transformed.

Perhaps this is such a place? Enter it with the intention of thinking and of hearing new words and combinations.  Emerge a little wiser and return again soon”.

The other place I’d recommend you to visit would be the Dark Mountain Project - “a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption”. Essential for any of you who think art and story needs to make a big difference.

Finally – please follow me on Twitter – I am @stevethorp1 – you can find my tweets on the twitter page of this website, and follow me here – or via the twitter button at the bottom of the page.


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Un-psychology – a tale from the wild frontier

by on 08/13/2011 | 0

Once upon a time there was a child. She was born free – the archetypal tabula rasa. From childhood a person was born: in stages through the ages she rose and struggled to become. When she was grown, she spoke of her childhood as if it had moulded her. I take after my mum in that she would say of a trait that she could not (or would not) change. My dad hit me so no wonder I am like I am, she might continue. They were never there when I needed them, no one was, she cried, as she fell pregnant at 16, had anger issues in school, over-ate, under-ate, acted out, underachieved , rioted.

The story of her life is encapsulated neatly by a developmental nurture assumption that has it that children are blank slates, that their personality and adult psychology is largely determined by childhood experience; and that – in the more pernicious versions of the tale – parental attachment is right at the heart of it. This story has been told and told until she and the rest of us all believe it to be gospel: from psychologists to newspaper columnists, psychiatrists to politicians, therapists to teachers, social workers to police-officers, and, of course, parents themselves (for more on this see Judith Rich-Harris’s The Nurture Assumption (1998 & 2009, Free Press) & No Two Alike (2006)).

Parental attachment and ‘parenting’, goes the story, is what makes a child a healthy adult; one that isn’t mad, bad or sad. Sanity is therefore all about childhood and the past, all about the absence of abuse and neglect, all about the presence of attachment, love and role models; and nothing at all about imagination and what happens to our wishes. Nothing, too, about the seed of hope or passion that grows from the moment we are born, nothing of the calling that takes this child in that direction and another in this one. (more…)

going west…

by on 06/08/2011 | 1


When the word finally came that we’d exchanged on our house sale, there were some tears and a realisation of how very much there is to do over the next few weeks to transport two lives from one part of the country to another!

From Banbury, where we’ve been for more than half our lives, to Pembrokeshire where we hope to live deeply into the next phase. Change carries hope and, sometimes fear, (which is why many people avoid it!). Yet to really LIVE, change sometimes has to be followed, embraced and burrowed deep into.

There is almost a human necessity in this. We use ugly words to describe what happens when we don’t flow downstream with the changes in our lives, communities and cultures: “stagnation”, “inertia”, “stuck”, trapped”, “blocked”. We find our perspectives start to ossify and our habits harden. Then we fear movement, and dig our heels in, convince ourselves that only THIS way is the way we can be.And before long we fear others as well, and that’s the time when our shadows start to become blind and dangerous.

We can see it in the eyes of people who have turned away from the promise and excitement and change. There is regret and loss, and a momentary freeze and flinch of realisation. A pinch in the face and bodies held against the world. There’s nothing worse than knowing that its too late, or that we lack the courage to take a step towards ourself.

So we will trundle down to the West and have a little adventure. Its not the wild frontier, but it will do for us for the time being. I want to use it to settle in, to think and explore, to be creative and playful, to write and collaborate – and to learn to surf properly!

I hope one day I might see you there….

soul of the world

by on 05/30/2011 | 0

There’s a lot going on. House moves to be completed (4th July – help!). Work to be done. Clients and friends with whom to have good (goodbye) conversations. Good times to celebrate and wonder at. Things to be grateful for.

This weekend was eventful. On Friday, my daughter Sarah’s new dance company gave their first, moving performance in aid of the mental health charity, Mind, and I was reminded that there is lot more to the world than words. I was also reminded of the connection of things and the words that can celebrate and evoke the passion and soul of human creativity. Someone who saw the show, writer Marcus Moore (and father of one of the dancers in the troupe) wrote this describing Sarah’s ballet Icarus:“As fledgling birds, the dancers stretch slowly from the floor, then skip to the eurhythmy of youth, rising to the beckoning sun, flocking to the call of the sky, ascending, floating, soaring”. Beautiful words and a blog worth reading!

The week was eventful. On Saturday, I was at the local Mill Theatre in Banbury, where we had a video link with Irvin Yalom, whose down-to-earth psychotherapy work and writings have influenced generations of therapists. The grainy image of this vibrant, old man talking to us  oceans and continents away – still writing, still working, still healing souls – was an inspiration. Best of all his playfulness brought a smile to my lips. It is possible to face the sun with courage, love and laughter – even in a fractured world.

Soul cannot be forced. It bubbles through and emerges where it will. And I understood that this move away from the place where I have spent all my adult life requires of me a pause. And after all this, I realise that what will come, will come.

Things change…!

by on 05/21/2011 | 0

After thirty years of living in Oxfordshire, and nearly ten working in Banbury as a therapist and consultant, things are changing. In the summer I will be moving down to Pembrokeshire; and as well as a transition in my own life – this will mean some significant changes in my work and practice (you can find information on these at the bottom of this post).

It will mean many goodbyes – to clients, colleagues and friends, to a loved house where I have spent almost two decades, and to the town I have spent all my married, adult life. And it will mean a new adventure for myself and my wife Mary and my three, beautiful, now grown-up, daughters. We’re building a new home in a derelict granary on an old farm three miles from the coast; our own ‘grand design’ (without Kevin McLeod and his cameras!).

However this is not just about moving, but hopefully marks an evolution towards deeper ways of supporting people. Over the months I will launch new projects, publish books and develop courses, websites and partnerships carrying new ways of thinking about life and work. There’ll be online learning , healing spaces for individuals and couples,  a training ‘school’ in integral practice and modern soul, and events. At least that’s the plan – things change, and that’s the joy of life if we are lucky enough to grasp it!

Changes to my practice

Banbury - From September 2011, my psychotherapy and counselling work will continue in Banbury on a Tuesday mornings. There will be a limited number of sessions available and these will be booked in half-termly blocks coinciding with the term times of a local school where I will continue to work as school counsellor. Contact me if you are interested in going on a waiting list to work with me in Banbury over the next few months. Note that some fortnightly and one-off slots may also be available.

Pembrokeshire – I will be starting up a small psychotherapy, couple therapy and coaching practice in Pembrokeshire from early 2012. Details will be posted as soon as possible. Please contact me for information about times, venues and waiting lists.

Consultancy and development work – Work with organisations can be negotiated. Click HERE for information on wellbeing and integral consultancy work, and HERE for information on my speaking and workshop services.

 

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