I do not need a £100 hairbrush. So why have I spent so long fantasising about one? | Mental health
I I recently found myself fantasizing the purchase of a hair brush that costs more than £ 100. It is a very beautiful hair brush: it comes in a choice of attractive colors and is shaped from fibers rich in keratin of the Southeast Asian wild boar and biodegradable cellulose acetate (entirely free from petrochemicals). It was announced to me on social networks and I looked for it later, by going again and again, by admiring photos from different angles and imagining the reassuring weight of his handle in my hand. If there was a hair brush that could help me build a better life, I thought it would surely be.
How disturbing I have become to buy this hair brush, I really can’t say. However, I can Tell yourself when I knew it would never happen. It’s just now, when I realized with shock, after months to googler and followers, that I do not use a hair brush. I haven’t used one in almost 25 years – not since I was old enough to understand that my hair is curly and terrible crepstruate things happen when I brush it. I use a wide tooth comb once a day in the shower.
So, I now wondered what happened here? What purpose was served by this fantasy to buy an expensive hair brush that I don’t need?
Regular readers will not be surprised to hear that I think it probably has something to do with the avoidance of my feelings. For some people (hello, friends), the purchase of things is used to neutralize an unwanted emotion. Another person can hit someone, or look at pornography, or do work on weekends, or eat a hamburger, or spend a night scrolling on their phone. You do it, so you feel a little better – and a little ashamed.
What emotion I turned away from? I don’t know. And if I ever discover it, it will probably not be for the publication. But perhaps the answer is less important than the question.
Many readers will think that I ask the bad question and that the answer to the question that I should Ask yourself: it’s capitalism for you! And if there was a socio-economic system that could sell a hair brush at an exorbitant price and exquisite fashion to a woman when she did not need it, capitalism would be. But I also think that shouting: “It’s capitalism for you!” does not build a better life. It can even move us away from that.
It is very tempting, faced with something that we do not understand of ourselves, to turn away from our own mind and towards our society. Shout on capitalism, on the Internet, on social media – to find an answer in the outside world. But what helped me build a better life is to notice my tendency to do it, then, as a patient in psychoanalysis, to ask me what I don’t want to see in my inner world which makes me move away so quickly.
In other words, I think that shouting: “It’s capitalism for you!” It would be for me the same function as drooling on an unnecessary hair brush. Everything is used to close a feeling. You can call it a kind of self-repayment.
I remember as a fairly new mom, in the depths of horror deprived of sleep, reading and hearing a lot about self-paying and asking me what people really wanted to say by that. The experts seemed to think that the solution to all the difficulties was that my baby learned to self-advance. I could not think very clearly at that time, because my child was sleeping – or rather, as it seemed to me, waking up – in cycles of 45 minutes throughout the night and therefore me too. We were going through something quite intolerable that should nevertheless be tolerated. We both had a lot of feelings on this subject, which felt that everyone wanted to appease.
Well, I think there is too much appeasement, yourself and otherwise. This is why Netflix, social media, parental experts, South-East Asian wild boar hairs and capitalism itself can have such power over us-because they feed our self-paying constraint rather than to feed our need to feel and try to understand what is happening inside.
Perhaps we do not realize that there is an alternative to the Apot. This alternative is difficult to imagine if you have never experienced it, but it is something that my analyst offers me and that I try to offer to my patients. This implies developing an ability to survive not self-suffering. Instead, wear everything you live without trying to appease it, without trying to brush the nodes – including not knowing what does not. Understand how it may not know it. This can be much more containing than looking for an immediate answer to a question that really takes us away from a more real understanding. (This is capitalism for you.)
Maybe our crying babies and crying babies in us need something different from self-paid. Perhaps we must all develop an ability to endure our distress and realize that we can survive and develop. This is something that can really help us build a better life, and a better society – much more precious than a beautiful hair brush that will sit in a drawer, never to be used.
Moya Sarner is a psychotherapist of the NHS and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations with adults looking for adulthood
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