These forms of coping with relational challenges are acutely reflected in the lives of many clients who come to psychotherapy and counselling with symptoms of depression, relational difficulties and/or social anxiety. Often, such clients find themselves continually plagued by internal criticism and shame as a primary way of organising their emotional experiences. Dr Erskine posits that a splitting of the self can be present, yet unrecognised in many clients. He offers several ways of understanding and empathetically working with our clients’ Schizoid Process.

Such clients require the psychotherapist’s consistent attunement to their affective state, a sense of meeting their sadness with compassion, their fear with security, and their anger with a sense of being taken seriously in the expression of that anger.

Through case studies and clinical examples, the workshop provides us with an understanding of the Schizoid Process and focusses on:

• The four different levels of psychological splitting and how we can work therapeutically with the concomitant psychological fragmentation
• Drawing on Object Relations and Integrative Psychotherapy, the workshop explains multiple methods and styles of intervention specifically designed to work with:
  • Attachment Patterns of the social self
  • The frightened, vulnerable self
  • The internal saboteur and
  • The encapsulated self
• How the Schizoid Process relates to some of our clients who present as depressed, shy, reticent or fearful of intimate relationships
• The therapeutic significance of both internal criticism and shame – especially in cases where shame has become a protective dynamic for the client to avoid vulnerability, humiliation, and loss of contact-in-relationship with others
• Dr Erskine illustrates the self-stabilising process of internal splitting and highlights the correlations with various forms of self, the five components of shame, the dynamics of compliance and withdrawal, alternating attachment patterns and the function of internal criticism

Overall, the workshop draws on developmentally-based, relationally-focussed techniques from Integrative Psychotherapy to emphasise the importance of understanding the client’s phenomenological experience, the significance of silence and the need for patience when the client struggles to voice their internal sensations and feelings; so we can effectively address the resolution of shame, internal criticism, compliance and relational withdrawal.

© nscience 2022 / 2023