Terrible things happen in life – but it is possible to recover from them | Mental health
WHe 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 very difficult to recover. Terrible, traumatized and scrambled things blurring. If you are someone who has suffered abuse; lost a loved one too young; lost a baby or a child; wanted a child and not being able to have one for any reason; has undergone an irreparable injury to your body and your mind; Or survived any tragedy that has left you drowning in despair, a better life can feel absolutely and irreparably out of your reach.
I understand that. I have seen it several times in my consulting room, and although I had a lot of luck in my life, I also knew this feeling of certainty that there are trauma which you simply cannot recover. When you are in the middle of it, or stuck in its consequences, that’s all there is.
But I learned, as a patient in therapy and as a therapist, that he can become possible for pain and trauma to be taken care of, put into words and understood. And this can include the most overwhelming, unimaginable and overwhelming losses.
This is easier to describe than done. We go to all kinds of lengths – often unconsciously – to hide from what hurts, to obscure the true meaning behind our pain. Sometimes we believe that we suffer, but in fact, we are not – we avoid it, pushing it back, turning your back there. Like hearing someone cry and slide quietly out of the house and close the door.
Take anxiety. A person can seek therapy because he wants help for symptoms of rescue anxiety – hammering in their chest with thoughts of racing in their heads and all of the mind and body which means that they have trouble getting out of bed. They are miserable. But what I discovered is that it can be easier, in some ways, to feel miserable about symptoms of anxiety than to feel the emotions we flee. These physical and psychological symptoms can emerge as a more acceptable diversion of deeper emotional anxiety that we cannot bear. This could unconsciously seem preferable to be in anxiety than to suffer. But if we want to have a chance to be able to understand the meaning in our sufferings, we must turn to the feelings, memories and losses whose anxiety leads us.
If you are paralyzed by anxiety, you do not live your life. But if you suffer and you know why, maybe because you aspire to something that you cannot have – love, security, a mother, a child – and you give the voice to this pain, even if you only do it in your own mind, if you put it in words and listen to it, you assist, then you can understand the meaning of your suffering and see you again. There is a consolation in this, and it is very different to let yourself be crying behind a closed door.
This is different from what people call “inhabiting” on or in something, which implies a kind of wallow, as worrying about an injury. Feeling your pain is what makes the movement possible, while diverting from it guarantees that you will remain stuck. This is perhaps what the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion was explored when he wrote that good therapy should “increase the capacity of the patient of suffering”.
There is just one thing more than I wanted to say about it. When something terrible happens to you, there is often a hypothesis – spoken or tacit – that it was your fault. It is of course possible that if you had made different decisions, if you had possible to act differently, this thing could or not happen – and it can be very painful, but crucial, of recognizing. It could also be the case that nothing could have prevented this thing from happening; That it was simply out of your hands, which is a really terrifying thing to contemplate.
It could even feel better to keep your guilt misplaced, because this conviction that it was your fault protects you from reality that terrible things can happen and that we can do absolutely nothing. The famous scene of Good Will Chuting when Robin Williams said to Matt Damon: “It is not your fault” is so powerful because the character of Damon thinks he already knew it, but we can see when he breaks down that he did not really believe it. What does not sound true about this scene for me is that he finally believes it because Williams tells him – according to my experience, it does not work like that. This is something that we cannot be told by someone else; We must find this truth in ourselves.
It is devastating to face this reality. But also counter-intuitive as it can be, a better life can come out of the anxiety of recognizing that we do not control. Because even if we cannot control what is happening to us, when we can experience our real suffering, our pain and our sorrow, we can find an understanding and a capacity for compassion, for ourselves and for others.
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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