Therapy builds on the idea of a return to live feelings. It’s only when we’re properly in touch with our feelings that we can correct them with the help of our more mature faculties – and thereby address the real troubles of our adult lives.
Oddly (and interestingly) this means intellectual people can have a particularly tricky time in therapy. They get interested in the ideas. But they don’t so easily recreate and exhibit the pains and distresses of their earlier, less sophisticated selves, though it’s actually these parts of who we all are that need to be encountered, listened to and – perhaps for the first time – comforted and reassured.
A Relationship
The ongoing contact between ourselves and the therapist, the weekly sessions that may continue over months or years, contribute to the creation of something that sounds, in a professional context, distinctly odd: a relationship.
We are almost certain to have come to see a therapist in the first place because, in some way, having relationships has become beset with difficulties: maybe we try to please people at once, secure their admiration, but then feel inauthentic and inwardly numb and so pull back. Perhaps we fall in love very powerfully, but then always discover a major flaw in a partner that puts us off and makes us end the story and restart the cycle. Perhaps we are simply very lonely.
The relationship with the therapist may have little in common with the unions of ordinary life. We won’t ever go shopping together or watch TV side by side in bed. But unavoidably and conveniently, we will bring to our encounters with the therapist the very tendencies that are likely to emerge in our relations with other people in our lives. Without intending this, in the therapist’s office we will play out our characteristic moves: we may be seductive but then cold; or full of idealization but then manifest a strong wish to flee; we’ll be preternaturally polite but full of hidden contempt. Except that now, in the presence of the therapist, our tendencies will have a chance to be witnessed, slowed down, discussed, sympathetically explored and – in their more damaging manifestations – overcome. The relationship with the therapist becomes a litmus test of our behaviour with people in general and thereby allows us, on the basis of greater self-awareness, to modify and improve, in the direction of greater kindness, trust, authenticity and joy, the way we typically relate to others.
In the therapy room, all our proclivities and habits are noticed and can be commented on – not as reproaches but as important information about our character that we deserve to become aware of. The therapist will gently point out that we’re reacting as if we had been attacked, when they only asked a question; they might draw our attention to how readily we seem to want to tell them impressive things about our finances (yet they like us anyway) or how we seem to rush to agree with them when they’re only trying out an idea which they themselves are not very sure of (we could dare to disagree and not upset them). They will signal where we are prone to pin to them attitudes or outlooks that they don’t actually have. They may note how invested we seem to be in the idea that they are disappointed in us, or find us boring, or are revolted by our sexuality. They will with stealth point out our habit of casting people in the present in roles that must derive from the past and will search with us for the origins of these attributions, which are liable to mimic what we felt towards influential caregivers and now shape what we expect from everyone.
Through a relationship with someone who will not respond as ordinary people will, who will not shout at us, complain, say nothing or run away – in other words, with a proper grown-up – we can be helped to understand our immaturities. This may be for us the first properly healthy relationship we have had, one in which we learn to hold off from imposing our assumptions on the other and trust them enough to let them see the larger, more complex reality of who we are, without too much intervening shame or embarrassment. It becomes a model – earned in a highly unusual situation – that we can then start to apply in the more humdrum but consequential setting of daily life, with our friends and our partners. We are given some tools with which to start to have adult relationships of our own.
Inner Voices
Somewhere in our minds, removed from the day to day, there sit judges. They watch what we do, study how we perform, examine the effect we have on others, track our successes and failures – and then, eventually, they pass verdicts. These determine our levels of confidence and self-compassion, they lend us a sense of whether we are worthwhile beings or, conversely, should not really exist. The judges are in charge of our self-esteem.
The verdict of an inner judge doesn’t follow an objective rule book or statute. Two individuals can end up with wildly different verdicts on the esteem they deserve even though they may have done and said much the same thing. Certain judges simply seem more predisposed than others to lend their audiences an essentially buoyant, warm, appreciative and generous view of themselves, while others encourage them to be hugely critical, disappointed and sometimes close to disgust or ready for self-destruction.
The origin of the voice of the inner judge is simple to trace: it is an internalization of the voices of people who were once outside us. We absorb the tones of contempt and indifference or charity and warmth that we will have heard across our formative years. Sometimes a voice is positive and benign, encouraging us to run those final few yards. But frequently the inner voice is not very nice at all. It is defeatist and punitive, panic-ridden and humiliating. It doesn’t represent anything like our best insights or most mature capacities.
An inner voice was always an outer voice that we have – imperceptibly – made our own. We’ve absorbed the tone of a kind and gentle caregiver who liked to laugh indulgently at our foibles and had endearing names for us. Or else we have taken in the voice of a harassed or angry parent, never satisfied with anything we achieved and full of rage and contempt.
We take in these voices because at certain moments in the past they sounded so compelling and irresistible. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodged in our own way of thinking and became a part of our minds.
A good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge: someone who can separate good from bad but who will always be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what’s going on and interested in helping us deal with our problems. It’s not that we should stop judging ourselves, rather that we should learn to be better judges of ourselves.
Part of improving how we judge our lives involves learning – in a conscious, deliberate way – to speak to ourselves in a new and different tone, which means exposing ourselves to better voices. We need to hear constructive, kindly voices often enough and around tricky enough issues that they come to feel like normal and natural responses – so that, eventually, they become our own thoughts.
When things don’t go as we want, we can ask ourselves what a benevolent fair judge would say, and then actively rehearse to ourselves the words of consolation they would most likely have offered (we’ll tend to know immediately).
We need to become better friends to ourselves. The idea sounds odd, initially, because we naturally imagine a friend as someone else, not as a part of our own mind. But there is value in the concept because of the extent to which we know how to treat our own friends with a sympathy and imagination that we don’t apply to ourselves. If a friend is in trouble our first instinct is rarely to tell them that they are fundamentally a failure. If a friend complains that their partner isn’t very warm to them, we don’t tell them that they are getting what they deserve. In friendship, we know instinctively how to deploy strategies of wisdom and consolation that we stubbornly refuse to apply to ourselves.
The good friend is compassionate. When we fail, as we will, they are understanding and generous around our mishaps. Our folly doesn’t exclude us from the circle of their love. The good friend deftly conveys that to screw up is what humans do. The good friend brings, as a starting point, their own and humanity’s vivid experience of messing up as
key points of reference. They’re continually telling us that though our specific case might be unique the general structure is common. People don’t just sometimes fail. Everyone fails, as a rule; it’s just we seldom know the details.
It is ironic – yet essentially hopeful – that we usually know quite well how to be a better friend to near strangers than to ourselves. The hopefulness lies in the fact that we already possess the relevant skills of friendship, it’s just that we haven’t as yet directed them to the person who probably needs them most – namely, of course, ourselves.
Part of what therapy offers us is a chance to improve how we judge ourselves and the voices we hear in our heads. It can involve learning – in a conscious, deliberate way – to speak to ourselves in the manner the therapist once spoke to us over many months. In the face of challenges, we can imaginatively enquire what the therapist would say now. And because we will have heard them for so long and over so many issues, we will know; their way of thinking will have become a part of our own thoughts.
HOW PSYCHOTHERAPY MIGHT CHANGE US
What sort of person, then, might we be after therapy, if the process goes as well as could be hoped?
Evidently, still – quite often – unhappy. People will continue to misunderstand us; we’ll meet with opposition; there will be things it would be nice to have that will be out of reach; success will come to people who don’t appear to deserve it and much that’s good about us won’t be fully appreciated by others. We’ll still have to compete and submit to the judgement of others; we’ll still be lonely sometimes; and therapy won’t stop us having to watch the people we love pass away, and falling ill and eventually dying ourselves. Therapy can’t make life better than it truly is.
But with these caveats in place, there are some low-key but in truth very substantial benefits we can expect. We’ll have slightly more freedom. A key feature of the defences we build up against our primal wounds is that they are rigid and so limit our room for manoeuvre. For example, we may have very distinctive but unfortunate characters we go for in love; or we can’t be touched in certain places; or we feel we have to be constantly cynical or else insistently jolly. Our sense of who we are allowed to be and what we can do is held prisoner by the shocks of the past.
But the more we understand the original challenges and the logic of our responses to them, the more we can risk deviating from whom we once felt we had to be in order to survive. Perhaps we can, after all, afford to hope; or be less afraid, or go on top, or spend some time alone, or try a new professional path.
We realize that what we had believed to be our inherent personality was really just a position we had crouched into in order to deal with a prevailing atmosphere. And having taken a measure of the true present situation, we may accept that there could, after all, be other, sufficiently safe ways for us to be.
We can be readier to explain ourselves. We had learned to be ashamed and silent. But the therapist’s kindness and attention encourage us to be less disgusted by ourselves and furtive around our needs. Having once voiced our deeper fears and wishes, they become ever so slightly easier to bring up again with someone else. There may be an alternative to silence.
With a greater sense of our right to exist, we may become better able to articulate how it feels to be us. Instead of just resenting another person’s criticism, we might explain why we believe they have been unjust to us. If we are upset by our partner, we don’t need to accuse them of being evil and slam doors. We’ll know to explain how (perhaps strangely) sensitive we are and how much reassurance we need to feel secure in their affection. Instead of trying to pretend that nothing is ever our fault, we can offer a candid explanation of one or two of our (unfortunate) limitations.
We can be more compassionate. We will inevitably, in the course of therapy, realize how much we were let down by certain people in the past. A natural response might be blame. But the eventual, mature reaction (building on an understanding of how our own flaws arose) will be to interpret others’ harmful behaviour as a consequence of their own disturbance. The people who caused our primal wounds almost invariably didn’t mean to do so; they were themselves hurt and struggling to endure. We can develop a sad but realistic picture of a world in which sorrows and anxieties are blindly passed down the generations. The insight isn’t only true with regard to experience; holding it in mind will mean there is less to fear. Those who wounded us were not superior, impressive beings who knew our special weaknesses and justly targeted them. They were themselves highly frantic, damaged creatures trying their best to cope with the litany of private sorrows to which every life condemns us.
PHILOSOPHICAL MEDITATION
To understand ourselves, we need not only to learn of our past but also to take regular stock of what is flowing through our consciousness in the present.
In so far as there is public encouragement of the idea, it tends to be according to practices collectively referred to under the term ‘meditation’. In meditation, we strive to empty consciousness of its normal medley of anxieties, hurts and excitements, and concentrate on the sensations of the immediate moment, allowing even events as apparently minor but as fundamental as the act of breathing to be noticed. In a bid for serenity and liberation, we still the agitations of what the Buddhists evocatively term our ‘monkey minds’.
But there is another approach to consider, this one based not on Eastern thought but on ideas transmitted to us via the Western tradition. In ‘philosophical meditation’, instead of being prompted to sidestep our worries and ambitions, we are directed to set aside time to untangle, examine and confront them.
It is a basic, distinctive quirk of our minds that few of the emotions we carry in them are properly acknowledged, understood or truly felt, that most of our affective content exists in an ‘unprocessed’ form within us. Philosophical meditation seeks to lend us a structure within which to sieve the confused content that muddies our stream of consciousness.
Key to the practice is regularly to turn over three large questions. The first asks what we might be anxious about right now.
We are rarely without a sizeable backlog of worries, far greater than we tend consciously to recognize. Life, properly felt, is an infinitely alarming process even in its apparently calmer stretches. We face a medley of ongoing uncertainties and threats. Even ordinary days contain concealed charges of fear and challenge: navigating through a train station, attending a meeting, being introduced to a new colleague, being handed responsibility for a task or a person, keeping control over our bodies in public settings – all contain the grounds for agitation that we are under pressure to think should not be taken seriously. We need, during our meditative sessions, to give every so-called small anxiety a chance to be heard, for what lends our worries their force is not so much that we have them but that we don’t allow ourselves the time to know, interpret and contextualize them adequately. Only by being listened to in generous, almost pedantic detail will anxieties lose their hold on us. At almost any time, within our minds, a chaotic procession flows which would make little sense if recorded and transcribed: … biscuits to the train why earrings deal they can’t do it I have to Milo phone list do it the bathroom now I can’t do, 11.20, 33 per cent it a 10.30 tomorrow with Luke why invoices separately detailed why me trees branches sleep right temples … But such streams can gradually be tamed, drained, ordered and evaporated into something far less daunting and illogical. Each word can be encouraged to grow into a paragraph or page and thereby lose its hold on us. We can force ourselves to imagine what might happen if our vague, catastrophic forebodings truly came to pass. We can refuse to let our concerns covertly nag at us and look at them squarely until we are no longer cowed. We can turn a jumble of worries into that most calming, and intellectually noble, of documents: a list.
A philosophical meditation moves on to a second enquiry: what am I upset about right now? This may sound oddly presumptuous, because we frequently have no particular sense of having been upset by anything
. Our self-image leans towards the well defended. But almost certainly we are somewhere being too brave for our own good. We are almost invariably carrying around with us pulses of regret, loss, envy, vulnerability and sorrow. These may not register in immediate consciousness, not because they don’t exist, but because we have grown overly used to no one around us giving a damn and have dutifully taken heed, along the course of our development, to recommendations that we toughen up a little. Yet a life among others exposes us daily to small darts and pinpricks: a meeting ends abruptly, a call doesn’t come, an anticipated reunion feels disappointingly distant, someone doesn’t touch us when we need reassurance, news of a friend’s latest project leaves us envious. We are mental athletes at shrugging such things off, but there is a cost to our stoicism. From small humiliations and slights, large blocks of resentment eventually form that render us unable to love or trust. What we call depression is in fact sadness and anger that have for too long not been paid the attention they deserve.
But during a philosophical meditation we can throw off our customary, reckless bravery and let our sadness take its natural, due shape. There may not be an immediate solution to many of our sorrows, but it helps immeasurably to know their contours. We might, as we turn over our griefs, large and small, imagine that we are sharing them with an extremely kind, patient figure who gives us the chance to evoke hurt in detail, someone with whom there is no pressure to rush, be grown up or impressive, and who allows us to admit without fear to the many curious things that have pained and diminished us in the previous hours.
The third question to consider within a philosophical meditation is: what am I ambitious and excited about right now?
The School of Life Page 6