Can psychotherapy save us from Brexit Anxiety Disorder? - Dr John Marshall

Can the techniques of psychotherapy save us from Brexit Anxiety Disorder, writes Remain-supporting Dr John J Marshall

Pro-Brexit protesters demonstrate outsde the Houses of Parliament. Picture: Getty

When you walk your dog in your local park on a sunny sublime autumnal day, and a random stranger announces loudly to the ether that “the worst thing about Brexit is not knowing how this is all going to end”, then walks on, you know t

Media hype promulgates the idea that we are all suffering from a Brexit Anxiety Disorder. Surveys of Scots show that Brexit is causing people to feel ‘powerless’, ‘worried’ and ‘angry’. Sadly, Brexit-related conflict also emerges as a ‘fairly common experience’, with more than one-in-ten (13 per cent) of all Scottish respondents saying they had a disagreement about Brexit with a family member or partner. How severe this reported distress is and whether the protracted Brexit process impacts on well-being in the longer term is a moot point.

Can psychotherapy save us? Imagine the country as a couple, one a Brexiter the other a Remainer, they have much in common but are on a collision course. What would a psychotherapist make of the warring pair attending couple therapy, arguing in the waiting room with two irreconcilable positions? As their therapist, I’d run away and hide. However, is it possible to steer through the unnavigable waters of Leave versus Remain? Direct arguments against either position won’t work because people who voted Brexit are pursuing comfort in an uncertain world. Insulting them as irrational is immaterial and only leads to ‘doubling down’. Fully understanding their behaviour is where any psychotherapy starts. Some answers can be found in work as old as the ‘Days of Yore’, a play by Richard Cumberland in 1796. The ‘Days of Yore’ is wistfully hankering for an imagined or long-gone British past, to desperately fight for sovereignty and relish the struggle against a foreign foe.

These ideas run deep and are about profound emotional identity survival. The Brexiters appeal to ‘taking back control’, fighting for (British) sovereignty, odd references to war, empire, a chance of a second life is ultimately based on a genuinely held visceral attachment to mock nostalgia. This is the more profound currency of Brexiters and the purist No dealers. I’ve studied people up close with complicated damaged and destructive lives, individuals with personality disorders and intricate life trauma and neurodevelopmental disorders leading to lifestyle chaos but when it comes to hard-edged no dealers I, as a Remainer Scot am baffled. But the discovery that they are setting sail for the Days of Yore using an emotional lens of viewing the world, coming to the aid of their identity crisis – it begins to make sense. “Setting sail into unchartered waters seeking blossoms scattered by a foreign ‘blight’. Facing the foe with courage and stratagems. She, hapless isle, in the wild tempest-tossed, bold voices saving the ship when Britain like some stout ship, which, sinking to her grave, surveys what none but British hearts can brave, and all past sorrows in that glass are drowned”. Okay, this is objectively speaking crazy stuff, but in psychotherapy shifting someone requires obliquity, coming alongside, gently nudging and give and take. Steamrolling with logic is doomed to failure.

Radio phone-in programmes are awash with psychological or psychotherapy analysis of how Brexit is stressful due to having to manage uncertainty, about the fractures and divisions as well as conflict between diverged positions. People are already rooted to their spots and are busy colonising them, then polarising due to confirmation bias – where we all herd ourselves to seek information out to support our already well-held positions and seal the deal with the predisposition that we have no biases in the first place. The radio doyen of rationality, James O’Brian seems increasingly baffled when his progressively robust factual diatribes, and accurate predictions hit the buffers of Brexiter emotion and longed for fights for control and identity. Mr O’Brian has his successes, but positions have generally not altered. Presenting people with settled irrational views with facts and they will dig in because attitudes and opinions are part of our identity. You can’t deal with certification for pilots, licensing for truck drivers or transfer of citizens’ data on WTO hard Brexit rules, fact. But facts are irrelevant if you hanker after that subterranean an ineffable warm, secure feeling of sovereignty or control. I feel much better now; we can deal with all that European arrest warrant stuff and transfer of crime data thingy later. (Mainly) Remainer Scotland, north European home of the enlightenment, might culturally be more open to rational discourse. This could be the source of much stress, not uncertainty about the future but how truths and predictions pass straight through opposing emotive minds, and visa versa, as we are talking different languages based on different cultural memes.

We need to understand that eager British Brexiters are on a quest for their own Days of Yore, intertwined with a memetic cultural fabric bolstering their individual character. The days of Yore where the people must “Fight, fight! Or perish in your country’s cause, stand for your king, your liberties, your laws” and in the process “dash their ship or cause death in a thousand shapes of horror drest, Night without stars, and billows without rest”. The spirit of gallantry repels foreign foes. Implementing Brexit (do or die) is a passionate, stirring yesteryear identity embedded in the formation of the idea of Britishness. It is the heart ruling the head, and no amount of rationality will change this. We all make emotional decisions, dig in, then need help to reflect.

It’s no wonder over-65s disproportionately voted for Brexit and those who feel more British and are biased to look back in their lives to rekindle lost or imagined comfort. In the end, you can’t reason someone out of a lofty (albeit self-injurious) position, one in which they haven’t reasoned themselves into the first place. Psychotherapy involves listening, understanding the other’s position, gradually illuminating by conversation, opening a space where change becomes a tempting prospect.

Dr John J Marshall is a Consultant Clinical & Forensic Psychologist