Beyond the Frustrated Self: Overcoming Avoidant Patterns and Opening to Life

This book foregrounds the life struggles of a single “frustrated” individual so that argument and theoretical exploration arise organically out of experience. The approach is integrative, enlisting a variety of models of therapy – psychodynamic, body-oriented, Gestalt, existential – as well as neuroscience, philosophy, and literature. The book also shows how developmental deficits interact with socio-cultural tendencies to amplify existential difficulties.

The “frustration” of the title is traced to avoidant attachment – pretending not to need others. In Brenda, the case study whose experience forms the focus of this exploration, it is associated with a body energy pattern that is both over-charged and over-contained, the result of anxiety-inducing and repressive parenting. This generates a self-frustrating process in which charge fights against containment, and bursts of energy alternate with boredom and affectless depression. The repressive defence that derives from avoidant attachment can make us professionally functional in our globalized and hypertechnologized society, but it works against us personally, so that we may experience our lives as dry, soulless and uncreative. Parental failure to filter the environment combined with an invasive culture have left Brenda, like many others, frustrated in her quest for a still center. Individual chapters on: energy regulation, cathexis, soul, boundaries, impingement, competition, power, and life narrative show how her existential difficulties can be traced to her core developmental issues. Using complexity theory and neuroscience models of integration, a way forward for Brenda and others like her is outlined. Play and finding meaning are highlighted as transformational hubs which, by restoring the capacity for experiencing, can bring wellbeing into her life.

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