Once you notice it, you feel it everywhere. This relentless, suffocating exhortation to be happier, to improve yourself, to get better – to build a better life. It might come from your parents, it almost certainly comes from the Instagram accounts you follow, you might even assume it comes from these columns. Most potently of all, it likely comes from your own mind.
It might sound obvious, but I’m not sure it really is, so I will say it: there are times when life feels very difficult, painful and overwhelming. When things go wrong, when things go right but that feels even worse, when the washing machine leaks and jobs are lost and homes are lost and people are lost and and and … when it takes all your energy just to survive. When telling yourself that you need to be building a better life is not only exhausting but cruel.
Sometimes this is the case when you least expect it – not when something bad has happened, but when something ostensibly good has happened, but you nevertheless feel bad. Such as when you have just moved in with your partner, and instead of the loved-up bliss you were expecting, you are experiencing a panicked suffocation and intense hatred. Or, when, as I have seen with so many friends, and lived through myself, you have just had a much longed-for baby, and instead of the predicted joy, you are experiencing total exhaustion, periods of desolation, and excruciatingly painful breasts. Or when you have just started university, or a new job, or therapy, or gone on holiday. At the very moment you thought you would be building a better life, instead you feel lost and as if life is falling apart.
At moments like these, telling yourself that you should be happy and getting happier, or pretending to yourself that you are, is a callous lie. I know this because it is one I have told myself. It’s a kind of gaslighting of yourself, to try to undermine your own instincts and convince yourself that your internal reality is what you want it to be, rather than what it is. The truth is that you feel disappointment, rage and despair. It is a gift to yourself to acknowledge this. This truth, about what we are really feeling, is the most nourishing, important and valuable thing we can offer ourselves, and it is the foundation from which a better life might grow.
I have always been struck in my work by my patients’ capacity to grow. To have experienced terrible trauma, neglect and other forms of abuse, and to use therapy to go on to build a better life for themselves and their families.
Part of what I find most meaningful about being a therapist is inviting my patients to use me and the space I offer them to come to know themselves more deeply and more truly, so that they can recognise and understand the parts of themselves that feel safer in situations that are abusive, that find relationships more comfortable when they are neglectful. Unless it is backed up by an unflinching emotional honesty about what you are feeling and thinking, including when things feel bad and difficult, the drive to build a better life can risk re-creating the same one you’ve always known, only worse, because it’s happening again. You are spinning around in the same spot, overwhelmed by forces you are powerless to understand because you cannot see them. These forces have even more power over you if you tell yourself that everything is great when it is not.
A friend who, like me, is a patient in psychoanalysis, put it so well when she said: “What I value so much about my analyst is that when I talk to her about some ugly part of myself that is feeling something horrible that I do not like, she doesn’t reassure me or tell me not to worry. She takes it seriously, she understands it as part of the human experience, she doesn’t judge me for it but she also doesn’t let me off the hook. She thinks about it with me.”
I can’t stop thinking about a news story I heard over the summer. The world’s biggest iceberg, A23a, is spinning in circles, caught in a powerful vortex deep in the ocean. This story is compelling because it is so recognisable: at times we may all find ourselves caught, stuck, held in place by unconscious forces we cannot see but which nevertheless seem to control our destiny, holding us back from development and growth, and the inevitable losses that follow. The difference is that, not being an iceberg, we can have thoughts and feelings about our circumstances, come to understand something about the unconscious forces that are keeping us stuck, and ultimately find any agency we have within our situation to change it.
It all starts with acknowledging that sometimes you feel bad, and that’s the truth.
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Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood