People come to therapy carrying many different things.
Sometimes they can name what they are carrying and sometimes not. They may speak of a grief that won't shift, an anxiety that follows them into every room or a relationship that keeps ending in the same way with the same feelings leaving the same particular emptiness behind, Sometimes what they carry is harder to articulate, just a sense that life isn't quite working, that something in them keeps pulling them back to the same place, the same pain, the same quiet disappointment, despite everything they have tried and everything they genuinely want.
If any of this feels familiar, I want you to know something. And this is something all good therapists know but often forget to say.
This is not weakness. It is not failure. It is not evidence that you are broken beyond repair. It is one of the most human things there is.
Freud observed that what we cannot remember, we are destined to repeat. What we have buried, because it was too painful/overwhelming to hold consciously, does not simply disappear. It goes underground and from here it shapes us. Quietly, persistently and often invisibly. If we take the time to really stop and look carefully we may catch glimpses of what is there through our choices, the relationships we find ourselves in, the patterns we enact without quite knowing we are enacting them. Our sense of what we deserve or what love is supposed to feel like.
The body keeps the score, as the psychiatrist and trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk wrote. Our nervous systems remember what our minds have aside. They carry the imprint of everything we have lived through, And they try, faithfully and endlessly, to finish what was never resolved. In short to find resolution for the story that was interrupted before it could reach its end.
This is not self-destruction. It is the psyche doing exactly what it was designed to do. Reaching always, toward completion. Toward that sense of home.
The tragedy is that home, for many of us, was not a safe place. And so we keep returning to the familiar, not because the familiar is good for us, but because it is known. And the known, however painful, feels more navigable than the terrifying openess of something genuinely new.
Our relationships are everything
Of all the things we carry, our relationships with other people are perhaps the most consequential. They can be the source of our deepest joy, of feeling truly known, held, at home in the world. And they can be the source of our most profound pain.
This is not a reason to held back from them. It is a reason to take them seriously.
One of the things I have come to believe most deeply, both as a therapist as as someone who has lived a life, is this - when people behave in ways that are hurtful or withholding or destructive, it is almost always from a place of pain. Not as an excuse. But there is a huge freedom available to us if we embrace this idea as it changes how we view others and what becomes possible.
The person who cannot get close usually learned early that closeness was dangerous. The person who leaves before they can be left has usually been left in a way that they never recovered from. Understanding this does not make the hurt disappear. But it makes it navigable in a way that pure reaction never can.
What Psychodynamic Psychotherapy offers
Therapy is not advice. It is never someone telling you what to do - we are all way too intelligent to really want to take on somebody else's thoughts however seductive these quick fixes can be.
At its heart therapy is a relationship - boundaried, consistent and honest. And it is here that the patterns you carry begin to show themselves and where they can be noticed and named in safety. Only then can something start to shift.
Not overnight and not without pain. But genuinely. Finally we no longer keep come home to the wrong place.
If something in this piece resonates and you are considering therapy, I welcome you to contact me Deborah Mckay Psychotherapy | Psychotherapy for Couples and Individuals in Clapham, London and Online