Tag: existential analysis

On composite identity

Leave a comment

“Where are you from?” can be the most difficult question to answer.

I come from a Russian family, but I was born in Latvia. When I went to study in the US for a year, I felt very Russian there. Later, life brought me to study in Russia, and I didn’t feel fully Russian at all. That’s where I felt more Latvian. For Latvia I am always Russian, due to the political landscape.

Since my parents are Russian, does that make me Russian as well? Then why did I feel so off when I actually was in Russia? Since I was born and lived for 20 years in Latvia, does that make me Latvian?.. I felt that I was definitely from Riga, but the whole of Latvia I wasn’t sure..

So I ended up being a Latvian-Russian.. or something of that sort.. somewhere in-between..

I lived 20 years in Latvia and then I left. 25 years I have lived elsewhere. Can I still say I am from Latvia? I don’t know that much about the political situation there anymore.. I don’t have close friends who still live there.. I love the landscape, and whenever I go I really feel that this is where I am from, this is my place. I cry when I am in the pine forest and then walk out to the beach and I am in awe with the horizon..

Cumulatively I lived 15 years in Scandinavia: 3 in Sweden and 12 in Denmark. That definitely left a mark on how I do things. Some of the local norms really did infuse in me. The way I plan, the way I communicate at work, the way I think about time and agreements. These and other things just settled in, slowly, over the years and became part of me..

So where am I from now?..

I think about the Danish poet Maja Lee Langvad here. She was born in Seoul in 1980, adopted at 3 months old, and grew up in Denmark. Her debut, Find Holger Danske (2004), takes its title from a legendary medieval warrior said to sleep beneath Kronborg Castle, waiting to wake and defend the nation in its darkest hour. Denmark’s King Arthur, essentially: the embodiment of what it means to be truly Danish. Which is exactly why Langvad’s gesture of renaming him “Holger Nondane” and “Holger Nowdane” cuts so deep. She takes the national myth and asks, flatly: where do I fit in this story? The book is a collage: adoption records, newspaper clippings, political documents, her own text, all cut together. She replaces words in common sayings to expose the prejudice hidden inside the language. The book won Denmark’s most significant debut prize.

From 2007 to 2010 she lived in Seoul to reconnect with her biological family. Out of that came Hun er vred (She Is Angry, 2014), a book about the transnational adoption industry. She describes a commercial system where children become export products, worth $15 million a year to South Korea. She is angry at the South Korean government, at Danish politics, at the biological family, the adoptive family, her friends, and at herself: “she is angry with herself for being angry.”

In her poem she asks:

What nationality would you say I am:

a. Danish?

b. Korean?

c. Both Danish and Korean?

d. Neither Danish nor Korean?

Later she reflects: “I saw myself as white, which sounds strange, because I could see that I was not when I saw myself in the mirror. I was not used to seeing other Asian or Korean bodies. There were almost exclusively white bodies: school teacher, dentist, friends, family, principal, parents’ friends. It was too wild an experience when I came to Seoul and suddenly mirrors my own body in a lot of others.”

You can listen to the interview with her here: http://k-10094.blogspot.dk/2009/12/148-voices-from-within-korean-diaspora.html (starts around 07:45)

She doesn’t feel comfortable in her adoptive country. She doesn’t feel comfortable in her country of origin, though she says in some ways she feels more at home in South Korea, finding its landscape better suited to her temperament than the flat Danish countryside. An unresolvable in-between.

Feels familiar. The scale is different. The circumstances are very different. But the structure of the feeling, I think, is similar: we carry pieces from places and none of them adds up to one whole thing. It’s like a collage..

Langvad’s story is about displacement and the anger that comes with it. But there is another side to the collage: the part where you actually build something from the pieces.

In a study I did with my colleagues Elisabeth Schilling and Carolyn Patterson, we interviewed people living in Denmark and traced how their image of the future changed over time. What we observed was a “time-collage”: identity assembled from fragments of different pasts and different cultural contexts, layered with their ex-statuses. A person might carry their ex-Londoner self, their Greek roots, their role as a parent in Copenhagen, all on top of each other. Each new place added pieces while older ones shifted or faded.

Dorte, one of our respondents, grew up between Iraqi and Danish cultures. She had lived in Denmark for 19 years, the major part of her life, and still her name and her looks were a problem. “I never thought my name or looks could be a problem, but it is here in Denmark. It’s very.. people don’t talk about it. But it is there and we know it.” And yet she was actively constructing something from those two worlds: “For me, I come from a place that has two cultures, from that place grows a new culture. I’ve taken things from my own culture, from the Danish culture which I find really really beautiful…”

Cristofer, after years of moving between Greece, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Canada and Denmark, arrived at something quieter: “you always feel foreign, because you’re not from there, but somehow you feel that you have a sense of ownership where you are at.”

Two different things happening here. Dorte is building a new culture from the pieces. Cristofer is learning to feel at home without fully belonging. Both are forms of composing a life from fragments.

Yuliya Molina, a video artist originally from Mariupol, Ukraine, now living in Zagreb, Croatia, approaches this with a beautiful simplicity. In her short film NE-KDO (Some-body), instead of “or… or… or…” she chooses “and… and… and…” Russian and Ukrainian and Croatian. She arrives at her-self as a collage, all the pieces kept, nothing subtracted:

My friends at Hamide Design Studio in Copenhagen know this from their own skin. When they moved to Scandinavia, they were immediately put in what they call “the Turkish women box”: oppressed, uneducated, not feminist, Muslim. Their initial interactions were more like an interrogation based on a checklist than actual curiosity. So they started I Feel From, a social movement that changes the conversation entirely. Instead of “where are you from?” (the roots, the box, the passport), they ask: where do you feel from?

I invited them into my classroom to run a workshop, where we were encouraged to make our own passports. The answer is rarely one country. It might be a city, a kitchen, a language, a season. A grandmother’s garden. A particular quality of light. The passports became a social movement, workshops, exhibitions. I love it because it gives people a simple, concrete way to hold the multiplicity. You don’t have to pick one answer. It can be a plural one.. Instead of the Aristotelean logic of “either… or…”, it’s the Arabic logic of “and … and …”. Where the in-between can be a whole entity also..

In my practice I work with people who carry multiple countries inside them. They grew up somewhere, studied somewhere else, built a career in a third place, fell in love in a fourth. They code-switch between languages, between cultural codes, between versions of themselves. Sometimes they come to therapy because they feel they don’t fully belong anywhere. There is a grief in it for a belonging that maybe never fully existed.

What I see is that many of them have already done something they don’t give themselves credit for: they have built a self out of fragments, and that self works. It knows how to be in a Danish meeting and at a Russian kitchen table and at a French bureaucratic counter. But they don’t always see this as a strength because the dominant narrative says you should be from somewhere. One place. One clear answer. A box.

I don’t have a clear answer either. I know I cry in the Latvian pine forest. I know I think about time both the Scandinavian and Slavic way. I know my grief speaks Russian. I know that France, my 7th country, is slowly becoming something too, though I can’t name what yet.

So maybe the right question to ponder about is the one Hamide asks: where do you feel from?

If this resonates and you’d like to explore questions of identity and belonging, contact me. I work with individual clients online and in Lyon. I am also open to leading workshops on identity, cultural transitions and belonging with organizations, schools and small groups.

References

Langvad, M. L. (2004). Find Holger Danske. Gyldendal.

Langvad, M. L. (2014). Hun er vred: En personlig beretning om transnational adoption. Gyldendal.

Sircova, A., Patterson, C., Schilling, E. (2020). Constructing biography – constructing identity: Changeable concept of the Future in Migrants. Frontiers in Time Research–Einführung in die interdisziplinäre Zeitforschung, 101-132. DOI:10.1007/978-3-658-31252-7_6

Hamide Design Studio. I Feel From. https://www.hamide.dk/work/i-feel-from/ and https://www.hamide.dk/work/i-feel-from-social-movement/

Arrivals and departures..

Leave a comment

Finding one’s place..

It took one of my clients 19 years to realize they had left their home country. By the time we talked about it, they were already living in their fourth country.

Another client took 7 years to arrive to a new country. Everybody’s pace is very different.

These arrivals and departures are not so straightforward.

And to return to a country that once was home is not so easy either. At one point I was considering returning to Latvia, or moving to yet another country. Both felt equally difficult. In the 20+ years I was away, none of my close friends stayed there. The Latvian language is fading after two decades of not using it. Even my mother tongue, Russian, I am forgetting.. The only thing I still know is the city. Many street names are gone, but my visual memory is strong and I can find my way around. That’s it. Most of the connections, or connectors, are gone. A strange feeling, to be something in-between a guest and a local in the city where I grew up.

The person who was departing for 19 years: it was because most of those goings away were temporary. An educational program for a year in one place. Part of the higher education in another place. Some temporary work contract elsewhere. Work related prolonged stay somewhere else. A relationship started and ended.. but in between those beings away there were also some stays at home. However the last stay there was after a good 5 or 6 years.. being in their childhood room, looking at all those things that were waiting for them to come back.. that’s when they realized: actually I have left already, and that was 19 years ago.

And that room suddenly felt like a museum of life that never happened.. because other life was happening in parallel.

So often, when we have packed and moved our boxes to a new place, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have either arrived or departed. It’s a bit more complicated than that.

Which country are you actually in right now?

Have you arrived?

Have you left?

Is there a room somewhere still waiting for you, quietly, filled with a life that has not happened?

If this resonates and you’d like to explore questions of arrival, belonging, or what it means to feel at home inside yourself, in 1:1 sessions or as part of a group, reach out to me. I see clients online and in Lyon, and I am open to leading workshops on time, presence and belonging with organisations, schools and small groups.

On walking

Leave a comment

and being..

I like to go on walks. Often I start my day with one. It’s the time to listen to the soundscapes around me. It’s tome to observe and time to notice. Time to be with the world and let the world be inside of me. It quietens the mind, helps to sort out the thoughts, helps to zoom out and refresh. It’s a practice I cherish.

Sometimes I shift my attention to the sound of my steps and notice how it changes depending on the shoes, or the surface. I take in the sounds around me, what’s close, what’s far away.. maybe there’s a pattern, maybe the sounds are totally random. In Copenhagen it was fun to listen to all the bikes, each one with a very different melody. In nature it’s the birds, or the waves of the sea, or the wind in the trees, the bees.. Robert Walser captured this so nicely:

“With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper.”

In my practice I sometimes take clients on what I call a silent walk. We leave the room, we walk together, and we don’t talk. The instruction is simple: observe what you hear, what you feel, what you notice. Pay attention to the surfaces under your feet. Look at things that are close up and far away. Notice smells. If you feel cold, how do you know you are cold?

I worked once with a person for whom any pause felt threatening. The to-do lists were never-ending, the rush into the future was constant, and stopping somehow equalled disappearing. There was a huge fear underneath all that speed. So we worked with the walk. Because during the walk you are doing something, you are actively present, but in the mode of being. You are with the world. And that turned out to be the thing that helped.

I also use the silent walk in workshops with students, sometimes about creativity, sometimes about the variety of temporal experiences. In one of my workshops back in Copenhagen we walked through the city and through the Assistens Cemetery, which is both an active cemetery and a public park. About 15 of us. In silence. For about 25 minutes.

When we came back I asked what they had noticed.

One student said the cemetery felt like a celebration of life more than a place to bury people. Every stone had flowers or something around it, it felt very personal at every individual grave. Another noticed the contrast of being in a place where she usually feels older, thinking about old age, while hearing all the youthful sounds of kids going crazy on the playground right next to it. Someone else felt a large sense of nostalgia, the sounds of kids and lawn mowers reminding her of summer camps and elementary school and running around with siblings. Very grounding, she said.

One student talked about the bikes. Each one sounded different depending on the gear, the wheels, the pace of pedaling. She had tuned it out before, but now she heard it like music. Another noticed that during the walk there were many things she wanted to communicate and say out loud, and when they would catch each other’s eye, they knew they were sharing the same moment. A connection without having to actually speak.

Several students reflected on the silence itself. One of them said she struggles with dissociation and is working on it in her own therapy, and that this walk was a great lesson in actually trying to be more present, because normally when she has headphones on she feels blank. Another said it was a relief to not have to talk, that silence felt like a burden she didn’t realize she was carrying. “I need to shut up sometimes,” she said, laughing. “We’ve gotten so accustomed to filling the silence, and if everyone’s quiet, it’s like, oh, something’s wrong. But actually we were all just having a great time.”

One student noticed the same woman walking her dog when we went into the cemetery and again when we came out. She had no idea how much time had passed. Another noticed the sound of her own footsteps for the first time in months.

Silence as a shared experience is rather rare. It happens on some special occasions. But to observe what happens when someone gives a group permission to be quiet together is very interesting. Rebecca Solnit, in Wanderlust, calls walking a way of thinking. I’d add that it is also a way of feeling, and of noticing that you are still here.

In existential analysis we say: where we give time, that’s where life happens. The silent walk is one way to give time. And what you notice, if you do this once in a while, even 5–7 minutes of really active presence, of noticing where the light is coming from, what you are hearing, what the air smells like, is that those 5–7 minutes expand in retrospect. You remember them. They don’t blur into the routine.

That is part of what I work with in my practice. People in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s come and say: I feel like everything is rushing, like the days are all the same, like I don’t have enough time. And one of the simplest things I can offer is this. Walk. Be silent. Pay attention. The time will slow down.

Try it sometime. Tomorrow morning, or tonight. Leave the headphones at home. Walk for 10 minutes and just notice. What do you hear? What’s close to you, what’s far away? How does the ground feel under your feet?

If this resonates and you’d like to explore working with time and presence, in 1:1 sessions or as part of a group, reach out! I see clients online and in Lyon, and I am open to leading silent walks and time-perception workshops with organisations, schools and small groups.

There is something else for me about walking that I have not touched here: walking and creativity. There is a fair amount of research on this, and a long list of writers, painters and composers for whom walking was a non-negotiable part of their working day. More on that soon.

References

Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Penguin Books.

Walser, R. (1917/2012). The Walk. New Directions Publishing.

Matter of Choice

Leave a comment

Yesterday we kicked-off the in-person workshop “The Matter of Choice” in my Creative Time Studio in Copenhagen. Different professional backgrounds and different cultural backgrounds provided a very fertile ground for various perspectives and insights.

We looked at our first reactions to the topic of choice, what associations we have, and the etymology of the word in our mother tongues. We looked at how does the choice shows up for us in different domains, such as personal life, emotional life, professional life, and family life. We talked about the basics of existential phenomenology and how choice is approached in that line on thought.

This first part of the workshop already left me enriched and I am looking very much forward for the second part of it! There we will look at the existential choices.

If this resonates with you and you would like to explore the matter of choice as well – I will run the workshop online in June. Warm welcome!

Register here: https://system.easypractice.net/event/matter-of-choice-online-c796a

Matter of Choice: Self-Exploration Workshop, May 2024

Leave a comment

Recently the topic of choice has been very present in various domains around and therefore I have designed a workshop for self-reflection and self-exploration on this matter, the matter of choice. 

It would be great to see you there!

Kind regards,

Anna 

The Matter of Choice:
Self-reflection and self-exploration workshop

In-person in Copenhagen:

May 15 and May 22, 2024
18:00 to 20:00
Price: 550 DKK
Registration: https://system.easypractice.net/event/matter-of-choice-d56ed

Online:

May 14 and May 21, 2024
17:00 to 19:00
Price: 550 DKK
Registration: https://system.easypractice.net/event/matter-of-choice-9cd9a

This workshop is a space to reflect on the matter of choice, what do we associate it with. How does it manifest itself in our daily lives, in our professional and personal lives, in our emotional lives, where is it most present with us?

What are the choices we make or have already made and was there something that happened to us that we did not choose? How do we live those experiences?

Are our attitudes, moods and emotions, values and beliefs, a matter of choice?

Looking at the choices we make, how do they unfold in our personal history, but also in the history of the previous generations in our families, what is the greater context of choices (cultural, historical, etc.), where do those choices lead us? Is there a way to know it? How do we deal with the uncertainty as we must choose without knowing in advance about the outomce and consequences.

We might touch upon the topics of existential choice, conscious choice, values, time, comparisons we make, inner consent, sorrow, regret or joy, forgiveness and gratitude, freedom and responsibility.

Workshop leader:
Anna Sircova, PhD

Clinical psychologist, researcher and educator. Practices Existential Analysis and Logotherapy. Specializes in transitions and endings, psychology of time, existential questions. Passionate for cross-disciplinary approach, visual arts and other creative endeavors.

Her work concentrates on saying “yes” to life, on finding your personal time, core essence, meaning and fulfillment. Denmark is the sixth country that became her home (Latvia – USA – Russia – Spain – Sweden – Denmark). Founder of Creative Time Studio, with over 20 years of research experience in exploring the concept of time.

TEDx speaker, expert in creative processes, well-being, psychology of time, futurization and so much more.

Some things to contemplate on:

“Life is a sum of all your choices” ~ Pythagoras

Lewis Carroll’s Alice tells the Cheshire Cat: “I don’t much care where … so long as I get somewhere.“

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Theodor Geisel / Dr. Seuss “What Pet Should I Get?”
The cat?

Or the dog?
The kitten?
The pup?
Oh boy!

It is something
to make a mind up.
Then I looked at Kay.
I said, “What will we do?

I like all the pets that I see. So do you.
We have to pick ONE pet
and pick it out soon.
You know Mother told us
to be back by noon.”
“I will do it right now.

I will do it!” I said.
“I will make up the mind
that is up in my head.”
The dog…? Or the rabbit…?

The fish…? Or the cat…?
I picked one out fast,
and that that was that.

Baldwin
Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” ~ Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

WHAT AM I WORKING ON NOW – FALL 2022

During Fall 2022 I am:

DEVELOPING

A unique event in Greece tailored for those who want to learn something new about themselves, get inspiration, and find new ways of working. In collaboration with Ekaterina Zhuikova, clinical psychologist, family and child psychotherapist. June 27 to July 2, 2023, Greece. More info to follow soon. ..

Training course on Balanced Time Perspective coaching for practitioners – end of March 2023. More info to follow soon.

Running my private psychotherapy practice in Copenhagen

I specialize in transitions and endings, psychology of time and Balanced Time Perspective coaching and existential questions. I work in English and Russian, both in-person and online. I work with individuals and couples. Currently, I also work Pro Bono with people affected by the war in Ukraine. I have some availability – feel free to reach out. 

LEARNING

This year in my Logotherapy and Existential-Analytical Psychotherapy course we have started the clinical part of the education. Spring modules were on anxiety. The September 2022 module was mostly dedicated to depression, how it is viewed in existential analysis. The November 2022 module will be on treatment of depression.

Looking forward to joining the group in-person in London!

TEACHING

This Fall, I was running some workshops and guest lectures for various courses at DIS:

Exhibiting

In the month of December 2022, some of my art will be exhibited at the Gadens Galleri on Ryesgade 4, 2200, Copenhagen, Denmark. Opening will be on Friday, December 9, 2022. More info to follow soon.

***

How do I manage all of the above and a few things that were left out? I love working with my version of the bullet journal and I also follow my own medicine regarding taking the creative breaks.

I am available for giving workshops on:

  • Balanced Time Perspective and its role in Mental Health
  • Futurization: Images of the Future and Future Scenarios to develop sustainable attitudes and behavior
  • How to deal with culture shock
  • Using creativity as a resource.

I would be thrilled to develop a tailored talk / workshop regarding time, creativity and your field of interest.

Best ways to keep up with my progress and stay in touch with me:

  • subscribe to my newsletter with my recent discoveries and updates & invitations to my exhibitions / pop-up galleries openings, events I’m organizing / hosting, talks & workshops I’m giving, etc.
  • follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook

Find out more about me on my about page.

What Am I Working On Now – February 2022

Running my private psychotherapy practice in Copenhagen

I’ve opened my practice in Copenhagen in summer 2020. More information about it – here. I specialize in transitions and endings, psychology of time and balanced time perspective coaching and existential questions. I work in English and Russian, both in-person and online, mostly with adults, but adolescents and couples are also happening. I do have some availability in February – feel free to reach out.

Teaching

Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity – at DIS: Study Abroad in Scandinavia, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Psychology of Time – at DIS: Study Abroad in Scandinavia, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Psychology of Health – at National Research University Higher School of Economics, St.Petersburg, Russia.

Learning

Logotherapy and existential-analytical psychotherapy with at The Viennese School of Existential Analysis, London, UK.

Hindustani Classical Music and how to play on Bansuri flute. I now practice regularly with a tabla player.

Walking

During the lockdowns in 2020 I realized that I do not walk as much as I used to. So I started to pay more attention to it and I go on walks and hikes here and there. On average, in 2020 I walked 4,3 km / day (longest walk 40km), and in 2021 – 4,7 km / day (longest walk 30 km). In January 2022 I walked on average 6,4 km / day.

What Am I Working On Now – April 2020

Leave a comment

Time Talks

A series of online Time Talks – open lectures and discussions by the researchers and practitioners on various aspects of the concept of time in psychology. Run by Time Perspective Network, Denmark and Creative Time Studio. All the upcoming zoominars are listed on the Facebook page and website. All are recorded and further available on the youtube channel.

Teaching

Psychology of Time – at DIS: Study Abroad in Scandinavia, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Psychology of Endings– at DIS: Study Abroad in Scandinavia, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Learning

Logotherapy and existential-analytical psychotherapy with at The Viennese School of Existential Analysis, London, UK.

Hindustani Classical Music and how to play on Bansuri flute.

Researching

Linking the time awareness, future thinking and sustainability across disciplines: Futurization of thinking and behavior. Time Perspective Network, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Planning a study to address different observations made during the COVID-19 pandemic and reactions to it.

Cleaning up

Creative Time Studio is undergoing a spring clean-up, both in terms of revising various objects that collected there, but also revising the projects and courses it offers. I have a few ideas I’m developing at the moment and I am also opening up for individual consultations. More info to follow soon.

The 100 days project

This time around I have decided to join the #the100dayproject with short sound clips from my flute practices. You can follow my progress on Instagram – I post a minute clip daily in my story.