We can try as hard as we like to build a better life for ourselves and our loved ones, but the truth is that sometimes things happen that are very difficult to recover from. Terrible, traumatising, crushingly painful things. If you are someone who has experienced abuse; lost a loved one too young; lost a baby or a child; wanted a child and not been able to have one for whatever reason; suffered irreparable injury to your body and your mind; or survived any tragedy that has left you drowning in despair, a better life may feel absolutely and irredeemably out of your grasp.
I understand this. I have seen it many times in my consulting room, and although I have been very fortunate in my life, I have also known that feeling of certainty that there are some traumas that you just cannot recover from. When you’re in the middle of it, or stuck in its aftermath, that is all there is.
But I have learned, as a patient in therapy and as a therapist, that it can become possible for pain and trauma to be attended to, put into words and understood. And this can include the most overwhelming, unimaginable, earth-shattering losses.
This is easier described than done. We go to all sorts of lengths – often unconsciously – to hide from what hurts, to obscure the true meaning behind our pain. Sometimes, we believe we are in pain, but actually we aren’t – we are avoiding it, pushing it away, turning our backs to it. Like hearing someone crying, and quietly slipping out of the house and closing the door.
Take anxiety. A person might seek therapy because they want help for life-sapping anxiety symptoms – from the pounding in their chest to the racing thoughts in their head and the whole mind-and-body clench that means they struggle to get out of bed. They are miserable. But what I discovered is that it can be easier, in some ways, to feel miserable about anxiety symptoms than to feel the emotions we are running away from. These physical and psychological symptoms can emerge as a more acceptable diversion from the deeper emotional anguish that we cannot bear to face. It might, unconsciously, seem preferable to be in anxiety than to be in pain. But if we are to stand a chance of being able to understand the meaning in our suffering, we need to turn towards the feelings, the memories and the losses that anxiety leads us away from.
If you’re paralysed by anxiety, you aren’t living your life. But if you are in pain and you know why, perhaps because you are longing for something you cannot have – love, security, a mother, a child – and you give voice to that pain, even if only within your own mind, if you put it into words and listen to it, attend to it, then you can understand the meaning of your suffering and come alive. There is consolation in that, and it is very different from leaving yourself to cry behind a closed door.
This is different from what people call “dwelling” on or in something, which implies a kind of wallowing, like worrying a wound. Feeling your pain is what makes movement possible, while turning away from it ensures you will stay stuck in it. Perhaps this is what the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion was exploring when he wrote that good therapy should “increase the patient’s capacity for suffering”.
There’s just one more thing I wanted to say about this. When something terrible happens to you, there is often an assumption – spoken or unspoken – that it was your fault. It is of course possible that had you made different decisions, had it been possible for you to act differently, this thing might or might not have happened – and that can be very painful, but crucial, to recognise. It might also be the case that nothing could have prevented this thing from happening; that it was quite simply out of your hands, which is a truly terrifying thing to contemplate.
It might even feel better to hold on to your misplaced guilt, because this belief that it was your fault protects you from the reality that terrible things can happen and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. The famous scene in Good Will Hunting when Robin Williams tells Matt Damon: “It’s not your fault” is so powerful because Damon’s character thinks he already knew that, but we can see when he breaks down that he didn’t actually believe it. What doesn’t ring true about that scene for me is that he eventually believes it because Williams tells him – in my experience, it doesn’t work like that. This is something we cannot be told by someone else; we have to find this truth inside ourselves.
It is devastating to face this reality. But counterintuitive though it may be, a better life can grow out of the anguish of recognising that we are not in control. Because although we cannot control what happens to us, when we can allow the experience of our true suffering, our pain and our grief, we can find understanding and a capacity for compassion, for ourselves and others too.
Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author ofWhen I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood
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