Professional group study & Consultation

keeping ourselves alive & Engaged in depth work

MGM EU Study Group

October 2021 Theme:

– Working With Aggression –  Making the Environment Matter Again

READINGS 

  • SOMATIC EXPERIENCE CHAPTER 8 – ‘Rough & Tumble’ – pages 98-112.
  • SELF EXAMINATION CHAPTER 5 – ‘Finding A Mind Of One’s Own’ – pages 63-79.
  • PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS  – ‘Reaction Formation’ – pages 140-141; ‘Aggression-inward’ – page 239.

  • CASE FORMULATION REVIEW – CHAPTER 6 – ‘Assessing Affects’ – pages 102 – 121; 

BOOK CHAPTERS 

Highlighted, Underlined & Scanned PDFs

Guided Meditation

The essential expression of aggression is communicating to the other, “I am here, you be here, too!” 

The functions of aggression are to force the environment to respond, to make the environment be reliable, and to claim a space for one’s self to exist.

In the therapeutic process: 

  •  Our clients want the therapeutic work itself to stand up to their own distrust of the process, not just the therapeutic relationship.
  • Our clients want the therapeutic work itself to stand up to their own anxiety about the processes they are going through.
Bill Cornell

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

– William Butler Yeats

 

today

i lost my temper

temper, when one speaks of metal,

means strong,

perfect.

temper, for humans,

means angry

irrational

bad.

today i found my temper.

i said,

you step on my head

for 27 years you step on my head

and though i have been trained

to excuse you for your inevitable

clumsiness

today i think

i prefer my head to your clumsiness.

today i began

to find myself.

tomorrow

perhaps I will begin

to find

you.

            susan sutheim, 1969