Divorce, which is what Brexit is, takes a long time because it is serious. For divorce to work within a family, mediation is recommended. When a family breaks up with this much hostility its members rarely emerge unscathed.The escaping partner may be buoyed up by the hope of new adventures but the remaining partner is bequeathed with anxiety, insecurity and uncertainty.
On both sides of what we might term our national trauma, there is fury and hurt. It hasn’t gone away. In many ways it has heightened in the last fortnight, as the clock ticks down. There is fear and a sense of fragility, often masked by aggression and even bullying. It is easy for both parties in this traumatic break to exclude or ridicule the legitimacy of the other’s position.
The result of the referendum was a transfer of angry feelings from many leavers, those who had been economically and socially squeezed, to remainers. There was no escaping the leavers’ fury. We have all had to see the country as broken; to give up the delusion that everyone was OK. Manifestly people weren’t. The question is how to absorb and reflect on the dispossession and rage. The Brexit vote said to remainers: “You will no longer have it your way. You are going to feel threatened as we have felt threatened. You can lose your hope as we lost ours.”
Last week I gave a talk to people who had moved from countries across mainland Europe to live in the UK. They were German, Danish, Irish, Norwegian, Swedish and Ukrainian – all of them, by chance or choice, had settled here. There was an atmosphere of anger and confusion in the room. With their children in school, and having established their lives, they hadn’t expected to worry about their place in Britain: they belonged here. Now their idea of identity was under threat. The increase in episodes of racism since the referendum had caused many of them to think they had misunderstood their adopted country, one their children – supporters of Spurs, Liverpool, Crystal Palace and Manchester City – called home.
These children also supported teams from their parents’ countries. Like me, and many from around Britain, they have multiple identities, and this is for the most part untroublesome. Yet what they said and felt was not so different from what many feel. Belonging was suddenly contingent. The limbo these Europeans feel themselves to be in is in some ways merely an exaggeration of the limbo that is affecting the entire population of Britain. For those who fear Brexit, the future looks uncertain and there is a sense of powerlessness. Others, who worry that the Brexit they voted for won’t be delivered, feel equally impotent.
In June 2016, I wrote about the distress expressed to me and other therapists following the Brexit vote. This has only intensified over time. Alicia, who is 45 and works in the medical profession, tells me she feels collapsed; Brexit talk is taking over her life. Her work had felt precariously balanced but now she fears she is unable to provide what she would want to for her patients or in her research. She is glued to the news, desperate to find a hint that what has happened will be undone. She wonders if she is insane to be in such a rage. Isaac, in his late 30s, has gone from being optimistic about Brexit to extreme pessimism. His job is under threat. He feels weakened and powerless. He wants to vote again. Sophie, a chemistry graduate student, who has lived in the UK since she was 13, has been asked to produce evidence that she has had private health insurance since she was a child in order to make a claim to become naturalised. She is poleaxed by the request and berates herself, despite the fact that organising this insurance would never have been her job.
Therapists talk of traumatic reaction, when we feel shock and continually retell a story. This is what I am seeing and hearing, inside and outside the consulting room. People infused with fury are desperate to unload what they have just learned about the machinations or projected impact of Brexit. We want it to go away and yet we are obsessed by it. Details have to be repeated. Did you know? Did you hear? There is a common psychological process of rejecting what feels indigestible. With each reiteration of the facts there is the hope that one can come to terms with them at the same time as an inability to do so.
Freud tells us in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) that trauma occurs when overwhelming events destabilise our emotional balance. For most of us, trauma describes an experience that takes place in our private lives: unexpectedly losing a loved one, or being in a situation in which our sense of survival is on the line, such as fleeing a country, or sexual intrusion, or being booted out of a relationship without warning. Unless we have lived in war zones or under dictatorships, we don’t tend to think of daily political life as so damaging. Yet reactions to Brexit suggest that it is being experienced by many as a trauma, with intrusive and repetitive thoughts emerging from a severely disruptive or damaging situation. Disbelief, fear and the wish for it all to be a bad dream are common features of trauma.
We separate off what we can’t bear to know, whether it is our personal part in the process, or the fact of having to recognise that those we thought were with us were not. We get lulled into thinking it will all be OK, only to be reawakened when we realise the bad thing has happened. We experience the shock all over again. We can’t escape it. Talking with friends and colleagues in Donald Trump’s America, there is a similar repetitive theme of outrage, disbelief and indigestibility.
For us in the UK it feels as if no one was minding the shop. The political parents have abdicated. Attachment theory, which originated in the work of John Bowlby, has shown the importance of secure parental foundations and presence in forming stable ongoing identities. Insecure, anxious and avoidant attachments can lead to isolation or cleaving to relationships that mimic the insecurities experienced in early life. With the country’s identity ruptured, people of all political persuasions find solace in forms of solidarity that amplify a sense of being beleaguered while simultaneously proffering hope.
The Brexit fracture and the belligerence associated with it has marked our society in disturbing ways. Public space is as inflamed as private space is in a divorce. There are lies. Many lies. Lying is not just a moral category, it has psychological import. It divides us from aspects of ourselves. To maintain a lie, we have to scaffold it, to separate it off from doubt and questions. Then we become defensive and more insistent, as though by being more forceful, the deceit will hold us within it. What is on the other side of the lie becomes unreachable. Complexity and understanding are suppressed.
We are all capable of this fundamentalist form of thought when we are cornered. We are all capable of finding outrage in the position of the other as a way of strengthening our position. We can seek solace in a fixed position as a bulwark against the difficulty of not knowing. The polarisation that Brexit has shown is inescapable. The democratic deficit many cushioned themselves against knowing is in our face. It is very real.
As the withdrawal negotiations continue with no sign yet of resolution, the sense of uncertainty continues. The anxiety it provokes can lead us to want to give up on what we believe, to throw in the towel and agree to things not in our best interest. This can be true wherever we sit on the Brexit divide. The pressure for closure is intense. The desire to remake our country, to paper over the divisions, to reset, is understandable but it does not get us anywhere. Without conversations that address the mutual disturbance, the hope for national reconciliation is slender.
The brutality of the current political discourse is disturbing. The new Brexit slogan, “Tell them again”, points to menace, not reconciliation or a coming together of differences in productive ways. We are going to take a long time to process the hurt, the shock, the disappointment of societal fracture. We will need to develop ways of talking and listening to get us out of our silos, to protect us from fixed patterns of thought as we try to remake our country anew. This is a big task. We know how difficult it is even for divorced families to reconstitute themselves so that their members all thrive. A nation rife with inequalities is a formidable proposition. Does psychotherapy have anything to offer here?
From Freud to Wilfred Bion to modern practice, psychotherapy has learned much about staying with uncertainty and difficulty, and the ways that this can be productive. It’s the bread and butter of psychoanalysis. We often want to act impulsively. To do so is a relief. It expels the difficulty by changing the circumstances that are causing distress. Psychoanalysis disrupts this process by showing how difficult thoughts and feelings can be considered from different perspectives that then enrich the real possibilities for transformation. The process of talking over time allows one to think and feel in such a way that uncertainty itself can be tolerated. It isn’t comfortable but is itself a counterblast against closing oneself off.
Therapy of all persuasions isn’t about what you do know but about what you can’t quite let yourself know. If we were transparent to ourselves, we wouldn’t need it. Therapy can also be a group process, in which people with different and sometimes dramatically opposed points of view learn to talk together and listen. They make common cause to support each other despite enormous differences which may start off as contempt or dismissal or just plain dislike. What never fails to impress is the emotional distance people can travel – from rigidity and fear to interest and acceptance of one another.
There is now a move to promote regional and national conversations that might start to mend the emotional fallout of the UK’s Brexit trauma. These wouldn’t bridge the serious economic and social divides. That’s an altogether more fundamental project. But we have examples of processes such as the women’s initiatives in Belfast across the Falls Road during the Troubles and the team of analysts from Argentina who trained people on the ground during the civil war in Nicaragua. There have also been countless faith-instituted projects bringing people together from Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh groups to strengthen their communities.
A commitment to this kind of process should be part of whatever change we make as a nation. Crashing out of the EU undermines our chances of addressing the trauma that Brexit has caused for many; a deal would provide a boundary of safety, enabling the complex conversations that need to occur. History tells us what happens when economies in decline, with mounting social and economic anxiety, are captured by oversimple populist slogans which cast out those who don’t agree or are deemed not to look or sound right. We need to ensure this doesn’t happen, and instead reknit the social fabric in ways that are equitable and just.