pinkfloydpsw's Blog

I’m in therapy, I’ve got a problem and I’m getting help to solve it. I would recommend this to anyone who asked me, whether they need it or think they don’t. What it is is not what you think. I decided to approach it very open mindedly and without prejudice, I wanted to know more about myself and what makes me tick. But what is therapy/psychoanalysis? I can explain it better using a series of negations rather than a straight up description. So here goes, what therapy is not….

• It is not a way to find the answer to why somebody else is problematic.
• It is not a place to go to ask someone else something.
• Your therapist won’t give you answers or advice.
• You don’t listen, you talk openly.
• It’s not somewhere where you can lie.
• It may not give you comfort, you may find out things about yourself that you don’t like.

This needs to be said, therapy can fix you, it may help you change, it may make you discover a better you or it may uncover your deepest flaws. I went to find out more about why I do what I do, why I let things happen to me that other people wouldn’t put up with, and I have. I learned about me, and that’s the point. But I’m not going to go into what I learned about myself and why I am the way I am, that’s my business not yours (although my blog posts might reveal it anyway). Save to say that knowing what I know now will help me avoid the same traps I have fallen into before. 

So you sit in a chair and you tell your story, she/he guides you but doesn’t ever tell you what you need to do next. Your story floods out in front of you and because you’re telling it and because you’re processing it you then have to deal with it’s problems and paradoxes. The important thing is that as you tell your story you are relearning not only the details of what happened but also the feelings that were present at the time, the therapist might ask you at some point “how did that make you feel?” Your answer, if honest, and if you can recollect, might reveal something important to both you and them. You remember things as events, but there can be a difference between how you feel now and how you felt then, we remember the past as if looking through a dirty bottle at a picture, we can’t see it all or feel it all until we are coaxed.

It is realisation that gives clarity, when you realise that you have been suppressing a memory or you have chosen to not think about an event that has an importance. You felt something once and you were affected by that feeling, but you chose for the memory to be unaware of its significance. This is the paradox, you felt, you carry that feeling forward but cannot explain it because you have rerationalised the event to seem unproblematic in an objective sense. That feeling affects your approach to the things it is now associated with, as they occur in later life then so does that feeling occur along with them. Let’s say you felt scared of the family dog when you were a child but you remember that pet only vaguely and unproblematically. You maybe might never get a pet dog, and you might never know why even though you want one and so does your family. You might find yourself going from kennel to kennel finding fault with every pooch you see until you’re out of options and still dogless. This sort of problem applies to all suppressed events, they will manifest sooner or later. Try to point me out one person who doesn’t have some of this going on? Say you have an overbearing mother that controls every part of your childhood, but you still love them just like every child should, you might become an overbearing mother yourself and do the sort of harm that that dynamic can do, without actually meaning to. Say you have a happy childhood but you are a middle child, you might resent your siblings without knowing it because they got more attention than you, I was a middle child born of a middle child. There are hundreds of conditions and situations that might cause you an issue that you never resolved, of course there may not ever be a problem either. Not everyone needs a shrink, not everyone fails to resolve.

So if you can know where your problem lays, and know why it is a problem, then you can act against it and stop it being a problem. Essentially you can live that ancient maxim from luxor – Know Thyself. Philosophy is the root of psychology, it’s first attempt if you will. I went to therapy to know myself better and now I feel I do, a success. There’s more work to be done, it may never be finished but it’s going in the right direction at least. I’ve learned more about myself in a month than I did in the 42 years that went before it.

Paul Simon Wilson