The Impact of the Pandemic on Clients with Addiction Issues
Recorded Monday 22 June 2020
Therapy In The Time Of Covid-19
This series of seminars examines the impact of the current Covid-19 crisis on individuals, couples and families through the eyes of practitioners as we navigate this unprecedented and surreal shift in our lives.
Our speakers will explore the emotional meanings of being in lockdown, the reforming of one’s sense of self within states of isolation, or in relationships with sudden intensified intimacy. As attachment issues become more acutely felt, where life-threatening levels of danger are encountered, where jobs have been lost, livelihoods disrupted, relationships frayed, loved ones lost, these enormous pressures on the psyche are inevitably a new focus of therapy.
READ MORE...How can we ameliorate the impact for our clients and – even perhaps – use this as a therapeutic opportunity? Where do we find our deepest resilience in times of crisis?
FULL PROGRAMME
The Impact of the Pandemic on Clients with Addiction Issues
Anna Santamouris
Anna will introduce her talk with psychoanalytic theory as a background to problems of addiction in clients. The talk will address states of narcissism and how these pertain to the addictions, including the mirror transference (mirroring and reflection), a preoccupation with self and inner reality, the imbalance between objective and subjective aspects of the self and the difficult relationship to reality that shows itself in a withdrawal from object relations alongside illusions of self-sufficiency. Anna will also discuss the loosening of repressions that may be triggered during the pandemic and the importance of developing the capacity for inner sustainment. The impact of the pandemic presents therapists with some real dilemmas in these areas: Anna will include client material to illustrate clients who have stayed sober, those who are struggling to remain sober and others who use binge-restrict cycles in their eating behaviour.