Protecting yourself from the feelings that drive you may give you a sense of control – but it comes at a cost. Working through them allows you to lower your defences. Recently I was walking to a session with my psychoanalyst when I realised I had just put my hand in my pocket to take out my house key.
Something I have learned from experience, as a patient in my analyst’s consulting room, and as a therapist to patients in my own consulting rooms, is that to build a better life you have to make your unconscious conscious. One of the many things my analyst is helping to bring into consciousness for me is how, without realising it, I act as if it were me who is the therapist, and she who is my patient, rather than the other way around.
Session by session, micro-interaction by micro-interaction, she observes and interprets the ways in which, despite myself, I seek to escape my own position of being the patient, attempting to use her as a pawn in this unconscious chess I play. Often when she offers me her thoughts about this, I immediately reject them – I don’t want to know.
It has taken a long time, but I can see now that I am recreating with her the dynamic I have carried since my early years, of feeling that I was the grownup taking care of everyone else – the one holding the key – rather than the child who needed care and worried about her poorly dad. This was a way to feel in control of a situation that was quite overwhelming and frightening for me.
This dynamic that shapes many of my relationships – of seeking to be the one who offers care and never the one receiving it – is so hard to lay to rest because it protects me from awareness of my own vulnerabilities. It is far more comfortable than actually being in touch with my own needs – but it comes at a cost. Because the part of me that does need attending to, that yearns for care and attention, goes neglected.
