In the bedroom, how clean and natural or alternatively disgusting and unacceptable do our desires feel? Might they be a little odd, but not for that matter bad or dark, since they emanate from within us and we are not wretches?
At work, do we have a reasonable, well-grounded sense of our worth and so feel able to ask for (and properly expect to get) the rewards we are due? Can we resist the need to please others indiscriminately? Are we sufficiently aware of our genuine contribution to be able to say no when we need to?
Candour
Candour determines the extent to which difficult ideas and troubling facts can be consciously admitted into the mind, soberly explored and accepted without denial. How much can we admit to ourselves about who we are even if, or especially when, the matter is not especially pleasant? How much do we need to insist on our own normality and wholehearted sanity? Can we explore our own minds, and look into their darker and more troubled corners, without flinching overly? Can we admit to folly, envy, sadness and confusion?
Around others, how ready are we to learn? Do we always need to take a criticism of one part of us as an attack on everything about us? How ready are we to listen when valuable lessons come in painful guises?
Communication
Can we patiently and reasonably put our disappointments into words that, more or less, enable others to see our point? Or do we internalize pain, act it out symbolically or discharge it with counterproductive rage?
When other people upset us, do we feel we have the right to communicate or must we slam doors and fall silent? When the desired response isn’t forthcoming, do we ask others to guess what we have been too angrily panicked to spell out? Or can we have a plausible second go and take seriously the thought that others are not merely wilfully misunderstanding us? Do we have the inner resources to teach rather than insist?
Trust
How risky is the world? How readily might we survive a challenge in the form of a speech we must give, a romantic rejection, a bout of financial trouble, a journey to another country or a common cold?
How close are we, at any time, to catastrophe? Of what material do we feel we are made?
Will new acquaintances like or wound us? If we are a touch assertive, will they take it or collapse? Will unfamiliar situations end in a debacle? Around love, how tightly do we need to cling? If they are distant for a while, will they return? How controlling do we need to be? Can we approach an interesting-looking stranger? Or move on from an unsatisfying one?
Do we, overall, feel the world to be wide, safe and reasonable enough for us to have a legitimate shot at a measure of contentment – or must we settle, resentfully, for inauthenticity and misunderstanding?
It isn’t our fault or, in a sense, anyone else’s that many of these questions are so hard to answer in the affirmative. But, by entertaining them, we are at least starting to know what kind of shape our wounds have and so what kind of bandages might be most urgently required.
3 Therapies
PSYCHOTHERAPY
In the arena of self-knowledge, psychotherapy may be the single most useful intervention of the last 200 years. It is a tool and, like all tools, it finds its purpose in helping us to overcome an inborn weakness and to extend our capacities beyond those originally gifted to us by nature. It is, in this sense, not metaphysically different from a bucket, which remedies the problem of trying to hold water in our palms, or a knife, which makes up for the bluntness of our teeth.
Therapy is an invention devised to correct the substantial difficulties we face understanding ourselves, trusting others, communicating successfully, honouring our potential and feeling adequately serene, confident, authentic, direct and unashamed.
For such an important invention, psychotherapy is low on overt signs of innovation. Technically speaking, it requires only a comfortable room free of any interruptions, fifty minutes, possibly twice a week for a year or so and two chairs. But at the level of training, the psychotherapist needs to undertake a period of extensive education in the workings of our minds which – in the more responsible jurisdictions – has some of the rigour, intellectual ambition and periods of hands-on experience demanded by the acquisition of a pilot’s licence.
To deliver on its promises, psychotherapy relies on at least eight distinct moves.
Witnessing
Most of what we are remains a secret to the world, because we are aware of how much of it flouts the laws of decency and sobriety we would like to live by. We know that we would not last long in society if a stream of our uncensored inner data ever leaked out of our minds.
A lot of what is inside us can seem daft: how we felt a strange impulse to burst into tears when reading a children’s book (about an elephant befriending a baby sparrow); how we sometimes imagine acquiring the power to go back in time and correct the missed opportunities of adolescence. Some of it is, from a harsh angle, distinctly pathetic: how worried we are about asking where the bathroom is; how envious we are of a close acquaintance; how much we worry about our hair. A significant part is alarming and quasi-illegal: our fantasies about a work colleague and a family member; our plans for what we’d ideally do to an enemy.
In response to our isolation, we are often told about the importance of friends. But we know that the tacit contract of any friendship is that we will not bother the incumbent with more than a fraction of our madness. A lover is another solution, but it is – likewise – not in the remit of even a highly patient partner to delve into, and accept, more than a modest share of what we are.
In every social interaction, we sensibly ensure that there remains a large and secure divide between what we say and what is truly going on inside our minds.
The exception can be psychotherapy. Here, remarkably, we are allowed to divulge pretty much everything we feel – and indeed, if the process is to work, should strive to do so. We don’t have to impress the therapist or reassure them of our sanity. We need to tell them what is going on. There is no need to stop them thinking we are perverted, odd or terrified. We can gingerly hint at some very dark things about us and will find that our interlocutor isn’t horrified or offended but, on the contrary, calmly interested. We’re not – we’re learning – monsters or freaks. We arrive at the opposite of loneliness. This may be the first (and perhaps the last) human we are ever properly honest with.
Worldliness
Therapists know a lot about the unvarnished truths of human nature. They have close-up experience of the greatest traumas – incest and rape, suicide and depression – as well as the smaller pains and paradoxes: a longing provoked by a glance at a person in a library that took up the better part of twenty years, an otherwise gentle soul who broke a door, or a handsome, athletic man who can no longer perform sexually.
They know that inside every adult there remains a child who is confused, angry, hurt and longing to have their say and their reality recognized. They appreciate that this child has to get to know themselves again and will want to be heard, perhaps through tears or near-incomprehensible mutterings, which might be utterly at odds with the surface maturity and self-command normally associated with the grown-up sitting in the therapeutic chair.
Therapists know the human heart, not primarily through books, but by being courageous about exploring their own nature. They may not share our fantasies exactly, but they accept that their own are as colourful and as complex. They don’t have our precise anxieties, but they know well enough the powerful and peculiar fears that hold us all hostage.
They can start to help us because they have an accurately broad grasp of what it means to be normal – which is, of course, far from what we insist on pretending it might be. They don’t require us to be conventionally good or typical to shore up their fragile sense of self or reality. Their only hope is that we will be able to admit, at last, without too much defensiveness, to some of what is really going on inside us.
Kindness
They are, furthermore, and very gratifyingly, on our side. Without ill
intention, most people are not quite; they are intermittently jealous, bored, vindictive, keen to prove a point or distracted by their own lives. But the therapist brings a focused, generous attention to our case. Their room is set aside from day-to-day pressures. They’re sorry that we suffered. They understand that it must have been worrying, enraging or exciting. They know we didn’t do it on purpose or that if we did we had our reasons. Without flattering us in a rote way, they strive to enter into our experience and to side with it. They look at reality through our eyes so that they can start to correct a legacy of shame and isolation.
At the same time, their kindness makes ours a bit less necessary. Normal life requires that we constantly weigh the impact of our words on other people. We have to consider their priorities, ask how their children are and hold their concerns in mind.
Here there is no such call. Like a parent who doesn’t need a small child to reciprocate, the therapist voluntarily forgoes equality in the relationship; they won’t talk of their regrets or insist on their anecdotes. They simply want to help us find what is best for us, understood on our terms. They won’t have a preconceived view of how we’re meant to live, just a great deal of sympathy for the complexities and the suffering we’ve endured already.
That said, kindness is not merely pleasant. Knowing that we have someone on our side is designed to lend us the courage to face up to experiences we normally evade. In a sufficiently calm, reassuring and interested environment, we can look at areas of vulnerability we are otherwise too burdened to tackle. We can dare to think that perhaps we were wrong or that we have been angry for long enough; that it might be best to outgrow our justifications or halt our compulsion to charm others indiscriminately.
The kindness of another gives us the security needed to probe constructively at our scared, puzzling, evasive minds.
Listening
It’s one of the structural flaws of these minds that it is immensely hard for us to think deeply and coherently for any length of time. We keep losing the thread. Competing, irrelevant ideas have a habit of flitting across the mental horizon and scrambling our tentative insights. Every now and then, consciousness goes entirely blank. Left to our own devices, we quickly start to doubt the value of what we are trying to make sense of and can experience overpowering urges to check the news or eat a biscuit. And as a result, some of the topics we most need to examine – where our relationship is really going, what we might do next at work, how we should best answer a letter, what bothers us so much about the way our partner returns our hand after an attempt at a caress – founder into the mental sands, to our grave psychological cost.
What helps enormously in our attempts to know our own minds is, surprisingly, the presence of another mind. For all the glamour of the solitary seer, thinking usually happens best in tandem. It is the curiosity of someone else that gives us the confidence to remain curious about ourselves. It is the application of a light pressure from outside us that firms up the jumbled impressions within. The requirement to verbalize our intimations mobilizes our flabby reserves of concentration.
Occasionally a friend might be unusually attentive and ready to hear us out. But it isn’t enough merely for them to be quiet. The highest possibilities of listening extend beyond the privilege of not being interrupted. To be really heard means being the recipient of a strategy of ‘active listening’.
From the start, the therapist will use a succession of very quiet but significant prompts to help us develop and stick at the points we are circling. These suggest that there is no hurry but that someone is there, following every utterance and willing us on. At strategic points, the therapist will drop in a mission-critical and hugely benign ‘do say more’ or an equally powerful ‘go on’. Therapists are expert at the low-key positive sound: the benevolent, nuanced ‘ahh’ and the potent ‘mmm’, two of the most significant noises in the aural repertoire of psychotherapy which together invite us to remain faithful to what we were starting to say, however peculiar or useless it might at first have seemed.
As beneficiaries of active listening, our memories and concerns don’t have to fall into neat, well-formed sentences. The active listener contains and nurtures the emerging confusion. They gently take us back over ground we’ve covered too fast and prompt us to address a salient point we might have sidestepped; they will help us chip away at an agitating issue while continually reassuring us that what we are saying is valuable.
They’re not treating us like strangely ineffective communicators; they’re just immensely alive to how difficult it is for anyone to piece together what they really have on their minds.
Time
Therapy is built on the understanding that we will not be able to transmit our key experiences in one or two self-contained blocks. We live in time and have to decode ourselves at different periods. Things emerge, sometimes very slowly, over months. We can’t be in all the moods we need to access on every occasion. Some weeks will find us readier than others to investigate particular memories or consider certain viewpoints. So long as we keep showing up and sharing, we’ll drop enough clues to assemble – eventually – a psychological portrait of the self, like an ancient vase slowly being pieced together from fragments scattered across miles of sand.
Interpretation
The therapist’s active listening is not meandering: what underpins it is an attempt to understand – for our sake – how the subterranean operations of the past are affecting the present.
We arrive in therapy with questions. We have a presenting problem which hints at, but does not fully capture, the origins of our suffering. Why, for instance, do we appear so repeatedly to fall for people who control and humiliate us? How can we be so convinced we need to leave a job and yet have remained unable to locate a more satisfying replacement for so long? Why are we paralysed by anxiety in every public context? Why do we sabotage sexual possibilities?
By their questions and their attention, their careful probing and investigative stealth, the therapist tries – harder than anyone may yet have done – to discover how our presenting problem might be related to the rest of our existence and, in particular, to the turmoils of childhood. Over many sessions, a succession of small discoveries contributes to an emerging picture of the sources of our emotional wounds and of the way in which our character evolved defences in response to them in a manner that hampers our possibilities today.
We may, for example, start to sense how a feeling of rivalry with a parent led us to retire early from workplace challenges in order to hold on to their love, as well as seeing, perhaps for the first time, that the logic of our self-sabotage no longer holds. Or we might perceive the way an attitude of aggressive cynicism, which restricts our personalities and our friendships, might have had its origins in a parent who let us down at a time when we couldn’t contain our vulnerability, and thereby turned us into people who try at every juncture to disappoint themselves early and definitively rather than risk allowing the world to turn down our hopes at a time of its own choosing.
But it is no good stating any of this too starkly. An interpretation – delivered in its bare bones – will be anticlimactic and bathetic and most likely prompt resistance or aggression. For the interpretation to work its effect, we as clients need to move from merely assenting to it intellectually to having an internal experience of the emotions it refers to. We need to feel for ourselves, rather than take on trust, the poignant drama undergone by the person we once were. There is, in this setting, no point in being too clever.
An intellectual understanding of the past, though not wrong, won’t by itself be effective in the sense of being able to release us from our symptoms. For this, we have to edge our way towards a far more close-up, detailed, visceral appreciation of where we have come from and what we have suffered. We need to strive for what we can call an emotional understanding of the past, as opposed to a top-down, abbreviated, intellectual one.
We will have to re-experience at a novelistic level of detail a whole
set of scenes from our early life in which our problems around fathers and mothers and authority were formed. We will need to let our imaginations wander back to certain moments that have been too unbearable to keep alive in a three-dimensional form in our active memories (the mind liking, unless actively prompted, to reduce most of what we’ve been through to headings rather than the full story, a document which it shelves in remote locations of the inner library). We need not only to know that we had a difficult relationship with our father, but to relive the sorrow as if it were happening to us today. We need to be back in his book-lined study when we were not more than six; we need to remember the light coming in from the garden, the corduroy trousers we were wearing, the sound of our father’s voice as it reached its pitch of heightened anxiety, the rage he flew into because we had not met his expectations, the tears that ran down our cheeks, the shouting that followed us as we fled out into the corridor, the feeling that we wanted to die and that everything good was destroyed. We need the novel, not the essay.
Psychotherapy knows that thinking is hugely important – but on its own, within the therapeutic process itself, it is not the key to fixing our psychological problems. It insists on a crucial difference between broadly recognizing that we were shy as a child and re-experiencing, in its full intensity, what it was like to feel cowed, ignored and in constant danger of being rebuffed or mocked; the difference between knowing, in an abstract way, that our mother wasn’t much focused on us when we were little and reconnecting with the desolate feelings we had when we tried to share certain of our needs with her.
The School of Life Page 5
