The Spiritual Social

Tag: mental-health

  • Shows about Shrinks

    Jodies Foster as psychotherapist Lilian Steiner in Vie Privee (A Private Life) 2025 : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33852162/

    “Ours is a psychological age rather than an institutional one” – R. Moore & D. Gillette

    Last week, I had a semi-funny chat with my analyst about the desk and the carpet in her office. As I’m preparing to embody the role of a therapist (hopefully in the coming year), we talk in our sessions not only about my childhood and personal traumas but also about random aspects related to the daily responsibility of showing up to work as a good-enough therapist, a ‘healer of souls’ who has to hold the patient’s emotions and do so within acceptable boundaries.

    I see each day how much of what lives in the mind and inside of our selves has nothing to do with how others perceive us. I tell my analyst my impressions about how I felt intimidated by her large dark-wood desk or that once her carpet was removed from the office I felt like the rug was pulled from underneath my feet. She just laughs and says “My previous client said that he started to hear an echo in the room. But I just sent the carpet to dry cleaning and I do this every year with my rugs. I like to rotate them in my office”. One thing is the fabric of reality and another thing the many, creative and often self-sabotaging ways in which we can interpret it.

    As I’m simultaneously allowing myself to be both a vulnerable client and an increasingly knowledgeable apprentice, I like exposing myself to a wide array of sources to get familiar with a therapist’s work and the various cases I may encounter. I began reading the “The mummy at the dinning room table”, a collection of short vignettes about the most memorable cases of celebrated therapists in the field. And I also finished Elyn R. Saks’ personal account of a brilliant woman living with schizophrenia in “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness”. And when I want to catch a break I watch some more shows about shrinks, because when I get in the zone, it’s hard for me to stop – I need to see the theme all the way through, and I blame this behavior on the Mercury trine Pluto aspect in my natal chart (which is also to blame for my attraction to the field of psychology).

    I began this year, actually in the first week of January by going to the cinema through a thick layer of snow to watch Jodie Foster perform (in impeccable French!) the role of a therapist who spirals in chaotic ways once one of her clients commits suicide. It’s a very odd and unique movie that kept me hooked, primarily because it’s a movie led by a woman therapist (and sadly, we don’t have many of those around) and it is focused on her forgetting to practice probably the most important thing in her line of work, which is to listen (not just non-judgmentally, but to listen to people overall).

    Caught up in her unresolved personal affairs and emotionally blocked by her client’s shocking demise, she begins to live a little outside of her clinical setting and finds her heart again. The final scene in the movie made me burst into tears as it was so impactful after the zaniness of the whole movie, which combines drama with savage laughter. I also just love Jodie Foster, who like my own analyst at the moment, is a Scorpio Sun.

    Sam Claflin as Dr. Joel Lazarus alongside his father played by Bill Nighy in the mini-series Lazarus (2025): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31186865/

    Moving on to the second show I watched, which was Lazarus, about a distraught psychiatrist who communicates with ghosts and finds out some disturbing things about his own father’s legacy. Although, I have a bit of a crush on Sam and really enjoyed watching him unravel on screen, I was in general slightly put off by this show. It was overly dramatic in the directorial style and the “too cool for school” editing, so that really made me wince a couple of times. What kept me watching was Sam Claflin, who is easy on the eye and damn good at switching between emotions. Of course, I wouldn’t expect anything else from a Sun in Cancer with a Pisces Moon, so yes, I was happy to tune in each night and see a talented actor go over many professional boundaries in this desperate pursuit to understand why his patients are dying and why his father keeps haunting him.

    Just for the record, I don’t know if I should write this or not, because it seems pretty obvious, but what therapists perform in movies has little to do with how therapy actually takes place in reality. Obviously, you do have a similar setting, usually a face-to-face conversation between someone who listens and offers advice and someone else who struggles and seeks help, but aside from that the similarities between on-screen therapy and real-life therapy end. It’s also good to keep in mind that there are so many different modalities of therapy you can practice or choose from, and one of my favorite games to play when I watch a show with shrinks is to figure out: a) “What modality is the therapist trained in?” and b) “Will this show confound psychiatry with psychotherapy again?” Believe it or not, they are different things.

    A psychiatrist is more of a medical doctor who can prescribe medications and is usually having relatively surface-level conversations with you, about your medication intake, behaviors, diet and overall life-style. While a psychotherapist offers exclusively verbal support and cannot prescribe pills to help you regulate your system, but may use fun techniques to help you remember, to help you dream or to help you confront aspects of yourself that may heal you. I’m using ‘may’ because therapeutic work can be as frustrating in its lack of outcomes as any other profession, and the first things you are learning as a student of psychotherapy is that you should prepare to fail, to lose clients and to not know it all. Being humble helps a lot in this profession, in which power issues can be disproportionate and problematic.

    I also really enjoyed the art deco, gloomy set design in Lazarus, displayed by the lavish psychiatrist office of Lazarus’ father, which to be honest, who can afford these days, especially on an NHS budget, but let’s roll with movie-logics and pretend that the gorgeous vintage office makes sense in today’s economy, although it fits better in a Spider Noir setting. Speaking of which, I wish that there would be more shows with shrinks in black and white or at least sepia undertones, like flicking through the pages of an old, vintage photo album.

    From a personal pov, by watching Sam play Lazarus, I realized as well that I am uncomfortably drawn towards intelligent yet emotionally vulnerable men, to the extent that I had a whole session with my analyst about where this bizarre attraction comes from. So I guess I can thank this show and Sam’s charisma for helping me understand a part of myself that I was weirdly not aware of and may benefit by keeping it in check, as I assume a lot of my future clients would fit this profile.

    Jason Segel as Jimmy and Harrison Ford as his colleague, Paul in the series ‘Shrinking’ (2023-): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15677150/

    And speaking of not being aware of a lot of patterns and blatantly crossing professional boundaries in your psychotherapeutic work, I watched the first two seasons of “Shrinking” and I have to admit I’m not sure whether I like this show or not. It’s irreverent in its depiction of cognitive behavioral therapists and their messy personal lives and you get that the show is trying to humanize them and to break through the intimidatingly impenetrable facade that most therapists have spent years creating (or hiding behind). And I like that, but in other parts the show can be kind of rude and insensitive.

    Much like Lazarus, it just feels dramatic for the sake of provoking outrageous emotional reactions from its public. For example, I really don’t know if it was necessary to have Harrison Ford (a Cancer Sun) drive a fast sports car in the show’s pilot episode just to prove his virility and lust for life in spite of being diagnosed with Parkinson’s moments before. I mean, it’s ok to be vulnerable, weak and old, America. Some scenes felt too on the nose and this bothered me about this show.

    The most controversial character in the series is Jimmy played by Jason Segel (a Capricorn Sun), who even has a whole episode dedicated to his unusual habit of “Jimmying” or going far too deep into his patients’ lives and adopting some shock-therapy practices to help them in their healing process (as a sidenote, one of his clients, a veteran with anger-issues, lives in his pool house! which is a gross ethical violation of the client-therapist alliance). On top of this, the screenwriters struggle so much to make Jimmy seem like a flawed man, a dad who is struggling as a single parent and a therapist looking for his father’s unconscious approval (as we see in his relationship to Paul), that he ends up becoming a sketch of a person, almost a poster man for the image of the ‘modern-day quirky and messed up White therapist with a good heart’. Just for the record, it’s not advisable nor commendable to act in such a way as a professional and actually most therapists put in years of hard work and analysis in order to tame the impulses that Jimmy so generously lavishes in.

    In conclusion, as an apprentice Jungian analyst I watched three shows with “shrinks” and without a doubt, A Private Life was my favorite, the other two being “meah” and rather funny experiments into depicting what psychiatrists and psychotherapists actually do.

    With cosmic compassion,

    Lexi

  • The Warmth

    Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project. Image taken from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/02/how-we-made-olafur-eliasson-the-weather-project

    I don’t know how else to deal with big things, except by writing about them.

    I’m sitting on a chair and talking. And as I talk something shifts in my mind. I understand. There is a logical thread now linking two disparate memories. All of a sudden a flood of warm sensations washes over my body and it feels like my frontal lobe & then my whole brain softens. I just had a breakthrough in my therapist’s office. And my body reacted to it by making me feel warm. It is this warmth I seek now, as guidance that healing is taking place & parts of me, like tectonic plates, instead of being pulled apart by hot, gushing lava, are sutured back together. A female Frankenstein, but on the inside. By making sense of the difficult experiences in my life, I release a pleasing warmth in my body, an emotional nectar that heals wounds which have been buried so deep inside of me, they seem almost invisible. However what is invisible can also be stealthily powerful in affecting our lives in mysterious ways, leading us towards self-undoing and self-harm. The warmth is then a sign that the light of my inner Sun sign is still alive, and that I am real and still alive.

    For the past two months, I have been on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication while also undergoing therapy. I started going to art classes while also exercising my body to improve my mental mindset. Slowly things were getting better and lighter until tragedy struck in a swift moment. There is a line in Arcade Fire’s song ‘In the backseat’ that is so heartbreakingly beautiful in the way in which it describes family-related loss and grief: My family tree’s / Losing all it’s leaves. This line stayed with me since high-school when I first heard it, but it’s only in March of this year that I got to feel the full impact of these words. March is my birth month. A month in which nature comes back to life in the Northern hemisphere, where I live. A month in which we celebrate Ostara or the Spring Equinox and the beginning of a new astrological year, as the Sun shines through the 0 degrees in the constellation of Aries (the first sign of the zodiac).

    In March of 2017 I lost my grandma. I also turned 30 and passed my PhD. I was having my Saturn return. And now as Saturn is approaching a conjunction to my natal Sun in Pisces, and I turned 37 years old my father is receiving treatment for cancer and I am no longer able to talk to my parents. I don’t yet know his clear diagnostic but the word ‘metastasis’ has been passed around from doctor to doctor since he fell in the bathtub in February of this year and wasn’t able to get back up. My dad can’t move anymore and there is something sick inside of him that is spreading from organ to organ, binding his insides into a map of darkness. It’s as if one by one parts of him are deciding to shut down and welcome the night. He is tired, and every cell in his body is expressing this at the moment.

    Dad didn’t have an easy life, but neither did he make the best of it. He complied and existed. He showed up and was stoically present while also abusing his body to the extremes. This body is now giving in and we are left to witness the cellular spectacle. If anything, dad is now showing me how much I need to love my own body, and to respect it. As my karmic teacher and through this disease, dad is showing me through the power of a negative example how not to live. He is teaching me indirectly that I should combine work with rest (he almost never took time off, except at weekends), that I should eat well (his diet was atrocious), that I should stay away from toxins (he smoked and drank most of his life) and most importantly, that I should move and stretch and feel my body (he is the most passive man I know). My body and my emotions matter, and as I am strongly feeling these statements I witness how my father’s body and emotions are ending him.

    I wrote about my dad in my book ‘Fatherhood and Love: The Social Construction of Masculine Emotions’, as our difficult relationship is what inspired my interest in how fathers express their love for their children. My dad is not an expressive man. Born with a Sun in Libra, Moon in Capricorn and Leo Ascendant, he is the kind of man who would rather tell dirty jokes as he is being wheeled into a hospital bed by nursing staff than tell his daughters that he loves them. He is actually suspicious of me and the affection I show him. He endures, dissociates and remains silent through it all. He is implacable like a wall when all I am trying to do is to relate to him, to talk to him. I can understand that a part of him has never been fully expressed or developped as he grew up surrounded by women, missing a father and the warmth of brotherhood from other men in his life. So he became a wall, a stranger on ‘foreign feminine’ territory.

    This wall is something I came across many times in all of my relationships with the men I loved and from whom to this day, I have not received any clear confirmation that they may have loved me at some point. The main issue that I wanted to explore in my PhD research and in the book that emerged out of it was: Is storge love something we only feel or also something that we primarily do? I was born into a part of the world in which it was customary to show love rather than put it into words, and in Romania the way people show love or do love is mainly by using food, gifts and money to make you feel cared for. Paradoxically, this same philosophy could be found in the South Node/North Node placements of my parents, with both of them being born in the 1960s and having a South Node in Sagittarius (action) which represents their comfort zones versus their North Node in Gemini (communication) which represents their uncomfortable growth zones.

    Needless to say, I grew up in a household in which screaming matches were a thing rather than calm, considerate communication – there were moments of peace and understanding, but they were not the norm. So I learned to repress my anger in an effort to detach from these fearful mom and dad behaviours which I was witnessing daily. And exactly this repressed anger has been triggered since the North Node of the Moon switched into Aries and began a difficult nodal return in my chart. To add to the karmic unfolding I am also having a transit of Saturn to my Mercury and Sun. This means that the angry matches I grew up witnessing in my childhood are now showing up in my personal relationships, forcing me to feel and process my anger but also to feel shame for witnessing a part of my Self ‘acting like my own parents’. The paradox being: that for years, I have been so afraid of becoming like them, and now I simply cannot help becoming like them. And anger and shame are difficult feelings to go through each day.

    Now I don’t know if the anxiety and sadness I have been feeling since the year began (and for which I sought professional help) was actually premonitory in some way. Was my body telling me that grief would enter my life and therefore I should prepare for it? My intuition has been at an all time high this year and my sensitivity to things in my environment has been exaggerated. I developed misophonia and am easily triggered by loud and unknown sounds which disturb my activities. I spent most of 2024 with my ears protected by large, high-quality headphones which would block environmental sounds as it was the only way I could go within and find peace.

    For the first time in a long while it felt awkward to follow my intuition, perhaps as Saturn in Pisces is currently ‘freezing’ the organic link I had to my intuition, bringing up a lot of self-doubt. I must admit that being on medication was keeping me calm and balanced, so I could help my parents through these trying times. But in the summer of this year, I released a job and my medication after finding out my therapist was just using me for money. Moreover, when my help was misconstrued as cold self-interest rather than one of the few ways in which my parents allowed me to show love to them, something snapped inside of me and I had to introduce a boundary between us. There simply is no other way for me to cope and to keep experiencing a healing warmth when all the energy I give is being used against me. So I am now my own ‘warmth motor’ and creating, writing, reading and divinating is helping me feel at home in the world again.

    As I am living at the moment inside my boundaried existence, I also keep wondering if something inside of my own body, some sort of genetic code awakening was out of sorts because the gene pool from which I come was getting sicker and sicker? Are we telepathically & empathically linked to our parents as much as we are genetically conditioned and biologically connected to them? When the source organism gets sick (the parent) does the derivative (the child) also begin to experience physical symptoms as they both are preparing for an inevitable separation? As our relatives depart, does something depart inside of us too? Could this be why people who have lost a lot of family members develop psychological disorders?

    I can’t help but wonder. But on a spiritual level, I feel that I am slowly releasing a karmic counterpart, and I see dad’s illness as a relief from the sadness of his life. He doesn’t really enjoy being here, in this incarnation, and as afraid as I see that he now is to depart from it, I believe the departure in itself is not shocking or scary, but a blessing for him. I just don’t want him to suffer too much. Despite this, I made the conscious decision to separate myself from my family, raising a boundary between me and them for a while, as I am piecing myself into what I hope is a stronger person. Being so attached to them, unfortunately prolonged a lot of my own co-dependency tendencies and suffering, and it feels better to just focus on my own healing, as they are dealing with their own.

    Whichever outcome, I am spiritually preparing for many possibilities, trying to make peace with whatever the Universe wants to manifest. But the whole experience has been revelatory since it reminded me that feeling broken or at least broken apart by life’s shocks and experiences, is a way to help put your Self back together again in a new way. Once the pieces of your authentic Self fall into place you get to experience a deep sense of warmth. It’s as if your solar light, your Sun sign as we know it in astrology, gets to be expressed again at full light and in full energy, helping you feel again at home in your mind and body. After an ordeal and as you process it you begin exuding a comforting light for those who may also struggle to be themselves and make healthy choices during trying times. Like a lighthouse in a bleak storm, you are the centre guiding others to their destinations.

    With universal love,

    Lexi