We come to therapy because we need help, and when we find ourselves struggling with problems that don’t seem to go away despite our efforts to fix them. Some people feel empty, passionless, or lonely. Others may may feel useless or defective, that they are impostors in their work, or that they can’t trust their achievements. Some feel that they just don’t have the energy or competence to take on life’s responsibilities. In relationships with family and friends, feelings of anxiety, anger, guilt and shame have a way of disrupting what matters most. You might feel content for a time, only to discover down the road that you’re stuck with the same fears and repeating familiar arguments.
These problems may feel ordinary and manageable one day and completely overwhelming the next. Many people try to stuff their feelings away or bottle them up when they become too intense. Often they find that, despite their efforts, they can’t seem to stop from feeling a certain way or acting against their better judgment. In not finding better ways to face their feelings, some end up hurting others, while others end up hurting themselves.
Even before coming to therapy, you might have tried to make sense of your problems and understand where they come from. The realization that your troubles often repeat over time gives an impression that they are not random and that they may even a have purpose. But the stubbornness of your problems also points to a persistent confusion about why you suffer and how to make a change. People come to therapy hoping to find greater clarity, and yet confusion tends to follow there as well. It can be difficult to know what therapy is all about or how it works. All one usually knows in the beginning is that they’re supposed to talk, and one often quickly finds that talking can be anxiety provoking. Sometimes you might find yourself unsure of what to talk about, while other times you may have so much to say that you lose your train of thought. You might feel lost in your head and in your words, but you also get the sense that you’re trying to say something important, even if you don’t understand it yet.
And so therapy can be just as perplexing as life. Persistent confusion about what you feel and what you do might convey a sense that you are are missing something significant in the picture of who you are. Reckoning with this idea in therapy can be scary, and it’s common to wish that therapists will always have the answers that will sew you back up when you feel unraveled. But experience shows that sitting with confusion, instead of trying to get rid of it, usually leads where you need to go. In staying with your troubles in therapy, you may find that at the center of your confusion about yourself is a loss; a loss experienced when you were young of those closest to you. Such losses may have been so unbearable that you’ve struggled all your life to feel something different than what was felt then. The more one tries to forget, the more such losses end up shaping what’s been gained. In turn, losses encountered later in life often have a way of resonating with those early losses that have been there all a long. Losses are hard to forget. We often aren’t aware of how tightly we hold on to them. When we remember too much, we become lost to ourselves and others. With this idea in mind, one could say that the aim of therapy is not to gain something (such as tools or coping skills), but rather to lose our loss. In therapy we uncover and mourn these losses in a way that clears the way for something new to be created.
By Shoshana Katz