We all want big personal change at the push of a button – but here is how to actually achieve it | Mental health
I I am emerged in the light after the first chapter of Potty Training our toddler. This involved not leaving the house for several days and cheerfully shouting: “More diapers!” While our daughter was running naked and we started learning together to get the poop and the small pot. I find that it is a fascinating process – as well as disorderly, devastating and joyful. I learned a lot by reading Oh shit! Potty Training, by Jamie Glowacki; A particular line struck me like the smell of the new poop on our whole cream carpet: “If you put pressure on the process, it will collapse.”
It’s not just true for pot training. Sex, relationships, learning, play, recovery – these are processes that must take place in their own way and time, because under pressure, they will distort themselves and collapse. Understanding this is the key to building a better life – but it is much easier to know this cognition than to live it.
We could say “no pressure”, but to say something does not. We suffer from a deep and painful desire that things are done immediately – so that there is, instead of a process, a button to support so that it happens. I wonder if it was this unconscious wish of immediacy that led humanity to develop machines and technology. Perhaps the inventors of the button at the end of the 19th century were motivated by their frustration as for the time necessary to develop and develop and learn and train relationships and raise children, and they created something that makes an instant change. You press a button and something happens – light lights up or a sound out or an explosion is triggered. It is attractive for so many of us; It gives the intoxicating illusion of control. Whenever we go home, as soon as my daughter sees the door, she says: “I want to press button.” Like many other children and in fact adults, she also likes to press her mother’s buttons.
We live at a time when so much can be done so quickly by pressing a button and its close relative, the blow of a screen, that it is difficult to accept that many things do not work in this way. Being in a process is a very different beast. A button works perfectly under pressure; A process can collapse. A button is easy to press; A process can be difficult to bear. A process is to abandon the illusion of control and discover the release and the limits of its own agency, while accepting that you did not know things and tolerant of being a beginner. I made in psychoanalysis how all this puts me abominable – and that explains why I am still in it.
As a new patient, I wanted instant results and convinced myself that I had already changed, that I had already grown up from my difficulties after a few months. Fortunately, my analyst refused my invitation to end with my fantasy that I could bypass the painful, difficult and complex process of real internal growth, which is not linear, and which develops inside. Instead, she gave me her reflections on what was really going on for me unconsciously, as well as her ability to endure the feelings that I wanted to control control.
This experience has shaped from my point of view that it is absolutely crucial that a therapist is able to identify inevitable conscious and unconscious pressures from a patient and draw attention to them. The therapist could then be able to open the possibility of exploring this pressure, so that the patient can have thoughts and feelings on this subject, to understand where he comes from and how he takes place in their internal and external worlds, in their past and their present. It was a huge relief for me to discover that my analyst could have been separated from me in this way, to have thoughts on the pressure that I suffered, rather than being crushed by me, like me.
Do I recommend a kind of loose Goosey, anything, poop anarchy on the carpet as the only alternative to pressure? I am not. I think that this hypothesis, that there can only be two alternatives – pressure or “everything that goes” – can make us very difficult for us to find our way through any type of development process, alone or with a partner, a friend, a colleague, a child, a patient or a therapist.
Being in a process means what means building a life – in childhood as in adulthood, with its best moments, its worst moments and everything else. I realize this again each time I dispute with my husband and we find a way to repair. And whenever I leave a session with my analyst and I feel completely lost. And whenever my daughter has an accident and I say: “Next time, you have to try to do it in the pot.”
Although it is painful and frustrating to recognize that nothing significant can be corrected by pressing a button, I also find it in the grounding. It is a relief to recognize that I am in all these processes and that everyone has their own life, and although I have an agency, I do not control their trajectories. This understanding, which refuses and flows and is not always with me, brings me to the hope which feels rooted in ordinary reality, rather than in a fantasy of chimerical selfie, filtered and without imperfection. It may seem quite subversive to our time of cancellation and cultural wars and to slide on the left or right. It leaves me freer, more fulfilled and more real.
