Good day, everybody out there in listener land. Welcome to another episode of Therapy Natters, the podcast about psychotherapy, mental health, personal development, different types of tea, and all these other things that make us who we are. Hello, Fiona. I've decided on a cup of tea despite the fact that it's nearly 25 degrees out there. Red bush, you got a cup.
I, I've got coffee this morning. I'm, I'm still I mean it's, it's, it's over a week now, but still having a little bit of jet lag. So a bit of coffee first thing helps me get through. So we've got a guest today, haven't we, Richard.
We do. It's guest week.
You mentioned him at the end of our last session, but we have with us Dr. Alan Greaves, who is a lecturer in, or a senior lecturer I believe, in archeology at the University of Liverpool. Which might seem a little bit disconnected from what we usually talk about, but he is also a UK C P registered psychotherapist and somehow manages to combine the two. This is what we will find out about. Good morning, Alan.
Good morning. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
So how did that crossover happen between archeology and then psychotherapy?
I won a prize, the National Teaching Fellowship which at the time came with quite a large sum of money that you could spend on anything you want, except yourself. And so I thought, Hmm. Training and my uh, best friend had trained with the National College of Hypnosis and Psychotherapy, and I thought, I. like that I was already training to do person-centered counseling. And I wanted to support my students more and that kind of thing.
And I was particularly interested in exploring issues around writer's block, which is something I've experienced. And I think many people in academia and just students and people in life have experienced. And so I was very interested in the psychological blocks around writing. So I went into it as a form of self therapy really, and then thought, oh yeah, this is really good, really enjoyed the learning.
And then set up a small private practice and I still see clients around writer's block and other issues. But I also then was able to weave it into my research because I could see how people in the ancient past were motivated by psychology just as much as people are today.
So you were telling us earlier that you had written an article in 2015. Tell us about that, please.
Yeah. Yeah. It is 2013 now. It's called it's all right. It was published years after the, after the conference, but that's how it is. Yeah, it was called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Ancient Greece, and so it was looking about the warfare experiences of soldiers in ancient Greece in the Battle of Marathon.
There's a very famous case there of somebody who has a traumatic reaction to what he sees on the battlefield, the Trojan War, the very famous case of Achilles and other historical figures. And looking at them, once I'd got the training in psychotherapy, I was able to read those texts and look at the articles that had been written about that much more critically from a point of view of a therapist.
And I started working with people who'd experienced P T S D and other forms of trauma and worked with the great Geoff Ibbotson on his P T S D training specialist training course. And I thought, Ooh, I think I've got a new angle on this. I think I've got something to say, which is the whole point about academic research is bringing something new into often a very, in our case, very long uh, discussion, but you feel that you've got something new to offer.
People often think about PTSD as being a, a new concept. Now as an acronym. Yes, it is. But as a process, as a, as a biological experience, I mean, that happens to the brain. Surely that's been with us since we fell out of the trees.
Yeah, I mean, I think biologically we became modern humans 50,000 years ago. Don't quote me on that, not my period. That's the, the classic kind of get out clause for archeologists, not my period. But yeah, we've, we've got the same biological rig as people had say, tens of thousands of years ago, maybe not hundreds of thousands of years ago. But physically, biologically, we haven't changed.
And psychologically, you know, the actual mechanics of how the brain works, Haven't changed, but there may be obviously different cultural factors. You know, the whole kind of nurture versus nature thing. The nature hasn't changed, but the, the cultural context, how we are raised and how we conceive of these things has, but you're absolutely right. It's a terminology thing really. And in the Victorian period people who were involved in rail accidents got something called railway spine.
They thought it was what we might call whiplash. But some of the symptoms are very similar to what later became called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. So as long as there's been trauma, then there's been traumatic responses, and often that's related to the new technology of railways of industrialized warfare in the First World War.
You know, if you think about the scale of the industrialized warfare, it's no longer people stabbing and shooting each other you've got machines and gas and things like that on a huge scale. And so people reinvent the trauma through their own experiences.
Was it shell shock.
Shell shock in the First World War, combat fatigue in the second World War. You might have heard of that term in the second World War. With Vietnam it became Post-traumatic stress disorder So, P T S D is the one that's currently in circulation and I wouldn't say it's currently in circulation in psychiatry, cuz it's become more nuanced the way you use those terms.
And this was my point in my article, those four letters have soaked into the public consciousness, into art and literature and songs and film in a way that has stuck. And that's what people recognize. And so there's a difference between what psychiatrists would define as PTSD and what the public would define and see or, or put those letters to in their own life experience and in art and film and things like that.
What can the past teach us about the present to help us with our future?
people always say people who, you know, don't learn from the past are, Doomed to repeat it, but we were always repeating the past, you know, we're always having more wars and
Yeah. Have we
tragedies. Yeah, exactly. And you know, I always just say to my students, like, you know, History is like shampoo. It's just rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat.
But actually it gives you a deeper understanding that the physical rig of us as humans hasn't changed, but society has and how different societies respond to mental illness or other forms of illness gives you an insight into, you know, when you're studying the ancient past, you're studying a culture, but it's just so alien from what we do now. But at the same time, it you think, oh, that's a really interesting way of seeing it.
I think you can read the ancient texts more critically when you're a psychotherapist and think actually they kind of had a, an innate understanding. They didn't need to put a word to it, but they had an innate understanding of mental health in a way that might surprise us actually.
They'd seen people go off to war and come back, changed that they'd seen people have babies and be changed by it in terms of their, their mental health And often what they pick up on, in the literature, in the art are individual symptoms. So for example, now we would think about flashbacks as being the kind of premiere symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. And we see that in films because when you're editing a film, you can easily cut back to a flashback.
They, they couldn't do that when they were writing plays or poems or what have you. So they use other tropes, what we call a trope, which is a kind of a shorthand for it, and that is usually somebody who's maintained a love of war, that they have that kind of reaction towards violence and that they try to solve everything through violence.
That's how it's often portrayed in the art or in the ancient near east of depression, what we'd call psychomotor agitation, which is just wandering around aimlessly, unable to settle. So you see that in the art, in the, in the writing, because they couldn't yet conceive of how to write a flashback.
So the, Ancient writings are describing behaviors and describing how those are perceived by others, rather than describing the reasons for them. Is that
Yeah. Yeah. And the, and, and the two are kind of connected, you know, so they, they know that people who go to war come back changed, you know, so it's what I call the old soldier trope is the old soldiers, in art, they tend to be quite belligerent, quite violent and pushing for more war, which is kind of seems a bit counterintuitive, but that is the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder.
You know, you think about the Vietnam vet who jumps when he hears a car backfiring and he is activating his kind of military skills and, shooting people up and somebody surprises him with a birthday cake and he gives him a karate chop. You know, that kind of thing. Not to make light of it, but those are the kind of tropes that we see that they also saw, it's a shorthand for a very complex set of behaviors and life experiences.
Did they have a treatment plan like we do nowadays?
Good point. Good question. I mean, they used to have these uh, temples to Asclepius who was the healer god. Called Asclepius. When you read about the kind of things they did, it involved like bath houses and quietness and lots rest and healthy food and you know, the kind of thing we'd think of as kind of meditation and relaxation. It's like a retreat really. Fantastic. Where do I sign up? and in one of those there's definitely, something that sounds like hypnosis being conducted as well.
So, there were things you could do if you had money, of course you could take your self off to an Asclepieion.
I'm also wondering about the, I don't not quite sure how to phrase this, but you mentioned Achilles. He's clearly treated as a hero in in those texts. And I'm, I'm getting confused now. Was was that Homer wrote about a
Homer. Yeah. In the Iliad.
Yes. Yeah. So was it perceived that there was anything wrong here or was it just that's part of becoming the legendary hero that this is, this is sort of what goes with it. Because I think that's changed somewhat, hasn't it? In modern times.
Yeah, I mean every generation reinterprets great works of art, you know, for itself and through its own kind of lens. So in the post-Vietnam War period was this fantastic book called Achilles in Vietnam, written by a guy who was treating Vietnam veterans as a, Therapist. And he was getting them to read the Iliad and read about the character of Achilles, and they were going, oh my God, that's me. That's us. You know that, that's, that, that's what, that's exactly what it's like.
That's what it's like. And so his name's Jonathan Shea wrote an absolutely seminal book, which has kind of Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships. This is the book that launched a thousand essays and dissertations about including my own on post-traumatic stress disorder in ancient Greece so actually what was really interesting there was he listened to the Vietnam veterans and that informed his research.
Rather than us reading the texts as academics or psychotherapists, he actually spoke to Vietnam vets and said, what do you notice about this that strikes chord with you? and obviously Iliad, it's an epic work. It is a very long book, but what was really interesting is what they call the betrayal of what's right, that the leadership of the war was conducted badly and the men were hung out to dry. And they were like, yeah, yeah, man, you know, that's, that's what it's like, you know?
So that kind of creeping paranoia that uh, people who experience post-traumatic stress disorder had are distrustful. They've developed a distrust of authority and that kind of thing. so again, that's not what you would expect, approaching it from medicalized, western point of view. But the lived experiences of soldiers can really inform our reading of the texts.
There's clearly a a lot there that we can, learn not just about who we were, but as a reminder of who we are and any opportunity to do that, I think is invaluable.
Absolutely. And it's, it is often about these social structures. Post-traumatic stress disorder, was first defined medically at or around or after the Vietnam War because of the experience of Vietnam veterans. Think about America, you think about a medical legal context about a kind of compensation culture, but also they wanted some kind of political redress for being made to go into this horrendous war.
So it's got a very politicized context, not just a medical context, there's a legal context and there's a political context about why that term came into use. And then once it was brought in for combat, then people have recognized that it exists for road traffic accidents. And so again, the legal context, medical context comes into it for cases of sexual assault or natural disasters.
There was a report called, I think the 1 billion report in which they said they estimate 1 billion people in the world have experienced some kind of traumatic stress through war, natural disasters So it's kind of grown and grown and grown in our 20th, 21st century culture and then medically it's being redefined and it's moved on. So you have other forms like DESNOS. Disorder of extreme stress, not otherwise specified, not as catchy as PTSD.
I can't see that one catching on and being mentioned in pop songs and things like that, like PTSD has, but the culture has taken it up totally that stress, accidents, trauma, violence, war changes you and we need to talk about that. And that's good that, as a society, we recognize that people are changed by experiences of stress and violence.
Well, it sounds like we were talking about it thousands of years ago and then stopped.
I think people stopped writing as well. So you have this flourishing of Greek and Roman culture and that's why they're so held up. we have older texts, but they're often administrative documents. And
not so much fun.
No. And then, and then like I say, every generation reinvents it for itself.
Well this, reinvention. It must have also happened during the middle Ages, during the medieval periods, all, all the way up until the present day. And when we did start writing things down with somebody Burton and the Anatomy of, oh, what was his name? He used to live close to me back in the 15 and 16 hundreds.
Are you that old?
He literally lived opposite where I used to live.
The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Yes.
That's by Robert Burton.
Robert Burton. That
Burton. The Anatomy of Melancholy.
It's, that's a good read. I mean, it's a bit big, but.
I think, you know, it's become clear that. It needs to have been written about obvious stating the bleeding obvious again, but it had to have been written about for us to know. So we've got those Greek texts, the epic poems. I would imagine, and I only know basically some titles of Greek plays. I don't know much about them except that they kill people on stage when they were doing them. But I.
I don't think that's true. Fiona
I, I was told it at school. So it must be true, they would get a condemned prisoner to play the role of somebody anyway. Um,
be true.
must be true. Yes. Yes. If Ms. Smart said it, it was true. But whatever and then I'm thinking about The Romans. Do you know anything about any Roman writing that includes any references to anything sort of mental health issues? I mean, I did Latin A level and we did Horace, and most of those are romantic. Not all of them, but most of them are romantic. There is a bit of warry stuff in there but there were huge insights into how people are in some of those poems, they're, really worth reading.
Oh, absolutely. So, like in The Aeneid at the very end when Aeneas kills his kind of arch enemy, he gives into his anger. And so The Aeneid is kind of an epic poem that's modeled on the Homeric Epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey. And so there's a conscious kind of what we call intertextuality, that they're all referencing each other. And so obviously there's some overlap there.
And when he loses control in anger, because he is reminded of the loss of his best friend, that's very much like Achilles. When his best friend slash lover is killed, he becomes angry and he can't control his anger. And the Roman model is all about self-control and you know, we are not barbarians because we can control our anger.
And so that's it with the character of Achilles as well, is that he has this uncontrollable rage, and that's, again, what we see coming through into the literature with this trope of the old soldier, is that they, they have, despite their experiences, in fact, Because of their experiences developed a love of war that seems to us counterintuitive, but that's a manifestation of this traumatic stress.
The reactivation of combat skills in civilian life or just general kind of seeing reds under the bed and that kind of thing, that hyper, hyper alert to explosions and noises and things like that. Yeah. And of course, Achilles is a construct. He is a construct of a character. You know, he's a myth. He's a, he's a hero, he's a legend. But in writing and constructing that character, Homer shows a lot of understanding of human psychology.
The long years of the 10 year Trojan War have changed Achilles and made him this, this violent, angry person that we see
So here's us with a, modern eye, looking at nature versus nurture and knowing that it's both, there's lots of things going on here. Culturally. Where did we sit all that time ago? Did we think that everything was set in stone when we were born, our destiny was in the stars.
Maybe not in the stars, but in the lap of the gods. So, the gods would decide what happened to you and you, you didn't know. But it's not predestined. So if you do something to offend the gods, then they will punish you. And so that's why you have to kind of appease them by making sacrifices and, all that kind of thing. The god's quite nasty. You know, there wasn't this concept of.
Abrahamic Christian Judeo Muslim tradition of, you know, a broadly benevolent God who's kind of looking out for you as long as you do the right thing. Oh, no, these, these gods had thunderbolts and earthquakes and pestilence at their disposal, and you just had to make sure that you kept them sweet. And if you didn't, then you would know about it.
And if something happened to you personally or as a society, then you'd done something wrong and you'd have to work out what that was by going to an oracle or a soothsayer or something like that to say, well, how have I offended one of the gods? Which God is it? And what do I need to, rectify that situation? Get back into their good books.
Well, that sounds very Catholic. You just gotta do your Hail Marys. That's
Right,
just gotta say sorry. And then it'll all be fine. It'll just go away. Oh, all right. Thank you. And although that might appease one of the gods, Does it appease our ourselves? Often? I would say, well, it obviously it must help.
that goes back to the, the point that Alan was raising earlier about the connection between the Trojan War and the Vietnam War of that it didn't feel just. To the person who was traumatized that, that's struck me as you were saying it, but I wasn't quite sure how to phrase it. I'm still not quite sure how to phrase it, but that somehow If you feel that what you've done was just, that's so much better than if it's, if it's not, or even if you feel it is, if society doesn't perceive it as such,
Mm
such a huge difference in the resulting psychology.
mm.
it's always the meaning behind it. How many times do we say it's the thought that counts?
And, and with clients, I always kind of say, what is it that you're feeling? Is it guilt? Is it shame? You know, that kind of thing. Because once you can put a word to it and you can say, ah, it's this then it makes a difference. So, regret. And so I literally, I, I, copyrighting this, by the way, I'm copyrighting this.
I'm gonna have a website called Sort Your Shit out.com and it's almost like, you know, you do your recycling and you put the glass in one box and the metal in another, and the non-recyclable is another. Just ask yourself, is this guilt, which is when I am judging myself by somebody else's values? Is this shame when I am judging myself by my own values or regret when I'm judging myself by my own values, all that kind of thing.
And then you as a therapist, you can start to work on that and you can just say sort your stuff out. And then when you know who's judging you and what you are feeling that you haven't lived up to, then you can do that. And with post-traumatic stress disorder and that kinda thing, it's often survivor's guilt. That my mates died, that there's this incredibly strong bond within the soldiers, that they've been through these incredible experiences together. They've trained together.
They've often grown up together. In the ancient world they would be family members, relatives, neighbors, all fighting side by side, and they died and I survived. And that, that's the survivor's guilt. And so actually stepping aside from that and saying what is guilt? Guilt is when you're judging yourself by somebody else's values that I should have thrown myself onto that grenade or, what have you.
Then helping the client come to terms with that and saying, well, isn't it better that you are here and whatever belief system you have, that helps 'em come to terms with it.
When we spoke with Gordon Buky Webster a couple of weeks ago. He was talking about some, research into PTSD that's been looked at lately that shows that a vast majority of people that get it from a traumatic experience like war, they also had trauma in their past. That the war, the atrocity, whatever it was they experienced, switched it back on and said, alright, this is the second time something this horrific has happened. I'm never gonna let you forget about this.
Mm
I wonder if that process has been going on for many, many thousands of years, that the neurological shift that switches on P T S D, a lot of this starts with the meaning behind it all. From whatever was going on in our past
Hmm.
from from year one, as soon as we born, and we start learning and soaking everything up. But that's not something that we can research because what do you do? You can't give somebody a bad experience ethically just to see what happens to them later on in life.
Yeah, I think you, you, you have a better outcome as a therapist. If the client had, the premorbid client was in a better place. You know, so if you had a stable, healthy, normal, all these kind of pejorative kind of terms, upbringing, then you can get them back to that place, And if their pre-incident, their pre-morbid lifestyle was chaotic and all that kind of thing. It's hard to, it's a lot more work.
It's not impossible to get the client, you can't get them back to a place they were in before the accident or the war or whatever it was. But you have to create that fresh, and that's a, a bigger challenge for the therapist and for the client and a longer process. So the premorbid individuals, Like you say, state of mind will, will determine the therapeutic outcome. But also, think about this, it's post-traumatic stress disorder. So I've had post-traumatic stress.
I was in a car accident, and for about the next month, I would like wake up with nightmares and sweating. And, every time I felt a jolt or had to get into a car or something like that, the trauma would be reawakened. And that's just how it was, you know, but it passed. And the thing with post-traumatic stress disorder is it's like being stuck in the groove of a record. You're reliving it again and again, and again, and again, and again, in flashbacks and, this kind of thing.
And you're retraumatized every time you hear a loud sound or so on and so forth. And the work of the therapist is to get you out of your groove and just let the music play and let it carry on and process because the, the fear is so bad that the mind doesn't allow you to process the trauma and move on. And so my waking up in a sweat from nightmares every night for a month was me processing it and then having processed it, I moved on and I can get behind the wheel of a car now and.
And all that kind of thing. so everybody has post-traumatic stress, which can be transitory, but it becomes disordered. When it doesn't process, it doesn't move on. And maybe what you are saying there, Richard then. Is that if you were somebody who already experienced anxiety and didn't have that stable childhood or premorbid experience you're more likely to stay stuck in that repeating groove than somebody who hasn't had that traumatic upbringing or what have you.
Yeah, so there's something there about the having the ability to process it and whether that ability to process it has been blocked by repeated experiences of processing because it, I think it is a really important factor to be aware of that having no response to a, significant stressor is, maybe more problematic than having a significant response to it because we're supposed to respond to it. we have to do something with it, and if we feel nothing, then what's that about?
Mm
mm One of the things I often say in these episodes is there are certain topics that we talk about, which could be a podcast series all by themselves, but I'm conscious that sometimes in trying to support somebody with a problem, you end up focusing on the problem. And then you support the problem, not the person.
Mm
And that's why I don't like the idea of us making a podcast series, which was only ever gonna be about one particular topic that was important to us. It needed to be as, as varied as as possible, and also make it easier to listen to for the general public as well, I think. I think you all appreciate that.
Hmm. Yeah. And I think that's, that's the, the interesting thing about the historical perspective is the one thing that we as archeologists or ancient historians can offer is the deep time perspective. Going back centuries, millennia, and that may help some clients to understand that this is a, just a part of life. This is a reaction, this is a response to life that is kind of hardwired into, into our rig, into our biology, and their experience is valid.
But it, it's also sometimes they need to hear that their experience is definitely valid, but also it's perfectly understandable because this would happen to anybody who's been through the kind of trauma that you have been through and has happened to people over a long period of time. And the advantage that we have in our current societies is we've got talking therapies to help people process it and move on as well.
I remember doing a particular training course. I think it was the National Guild Train the Trainers course, back in the day Fiona. Don't know if you remember
Oh gosh, I do remember that. Yes. that was a slog, that course. Yes.
I don't remember it being that much of a sl. Why? Why was this such a
was, it was a slog teaching it.
Oh, okay.
It was eight days solid with people from all over the world. So you had to be conscious of language all the time.
Oh. It was a lovely week. I had a lot of fun. We didn't, we go to the ballet. I think We
We did go to the
was
yes. Carlos Acosta.
Yes, that was him. He was astonishing. A little bit of insight into our past there, ladies and gentlemen, everybody in between. But I had to do some, you know, we all had to do some sort of presentation, do a little speech or something. And so I, I chose history, the history of hypnosis, and did a little presentation on some little bits that I'd, I'd picked up over the years. And the, the, the constructive criticism came back was.
Well, the only thing we can find here at fault Richard is that you didn't say why this was important for people to know. I thought, ah, yeah, good point. Yes, therapists should know about all of these things. He's me with the should. No, it can be helpful that they know all these things because then they can explain more to their clients and patients.
And taking your subject Alan of the ancient world, if clients can see genuinely this process I'm going through is so normal to experience that people were writing about it thousands and thousands of years ago. I'm clearly not alone in this experience. I'm not wrong to feel the way that I feel. I'm not broken, it's just that I'm human and this is what it is to be human who's had these experiences. And I think that's really, really useful for everybody to know.
I think you're absolutely right there that the most powerful message that you can give to a client is you are not broken. you've been through some stuff. You're going through some stuff, but you're fundamentally okay. And, and you can do that. I mean, I work in private practice. I don't work, you know, in nhs frontline services anymore. I have in the past drop-in centers and stuff. But you are working with the worried well in private practice.
And that might sound glib, but actually if you can help people achieve their life goals, manage their stress, their weight, their smoking, what have you. The health benefits and the social benefits and the benefits of the NHS are enormous. And you're doing that preemptively and working in partnership with the clients to, to achieve that. it helps them to say, okay, it's, a long experience that every society has had to deal with.
And you're not saying you are not special and unique because everybody's special and unique, but you can say, people have experienced this for a long time. There's a long history behind this, and we can get through this together. we can work on getting you to a better place. Then that's the message of hope for them.
I love the idea of uniqueness and connectedness, that everybody is unique and everybody's the same at the same
Yes.
I remember saying to Jack once you are unique just like everybody else. And it makes, clients smile to see that yeah, you are, you are you. Nobody else is ever gonna be you. That's what you were designed to be. Whoever designed you, whether it was whatever but, but you were also the same. Yeah.
yeah.
That's a lovely place to leave it, I think. Fiona, thank you very much for that and thank you, Alan, for jumping on board
You're welcome.
and chatting with us today. It's been lovely to hear from you. If anybody wants to uh, hear more about you, Alan, where would they find you?
Uh, You can check out my University of Liverpool webpage, Alan M Greaves at University of Liverpool. Yeah, that's, that's me. Just a quick Google search.
There's only one. You're unique and the same,
Yeah, you have to put the Alan M Greaves in. It's quite a common name in Yorkshire actually.
or is it? Oh, okay. Right. Let's go disco. We'll be back next week as always. What's wrong with going, let's go disco. What's that face for?
I just found it funny. That's okay.
I'm a bit quirky.
I know. That's, that's good. That's what we love you for. Well, one of things we love you for.
Thank you very much. I, I know that I'm lovable for being quirky. it's my superpower. But we gotta go. Have a super week, everybody. Like I always say in the show notes, there's a link to a page on my website where you can fill in the form and ask us some questions and give us some topic ideas and we'll natter about something different next week. Cuz we haven't decided what we're doing next week. I'll have to have a look through all the questions, see what's coming up.
I'll keep you in the loop Fiona and we'll talk about it next week. Have a good 'un. See you all soon. Bye now.