I was working with someone yesterday who was frustrated by their progress. Why did they keep repeating the same kinds of mistake? They’d get stuck in some sort of relationship, personal or professional, where the other person seemed anything but friendly or aware of what they needed.
Sometimes bad stuff happens to us, people exploit or abuse us, while at the same time doing all they can to shift responsibility for what they have done: to make it look as if we somehow wanted what they did. The person I was working with had experiences of that in their background. Repeatedly, since they were a child, someone had gained their trust, treated them terribly, and left them with a feeling that they had somehow invited the problem.
Elsewhere I’ve written about how therapy seems more and more inclined to require a client to ‘own their part’ in a problem, and why even if this is sometimes necessary (when I work with people who have addiction problems there’s usually a lot of stuff that’s been done that a person wishes they hadn’t done … which becomes part of a much bigger problem) it is always risky. So many problems originate in predatory, abusive or aggressive behaviour where someone is targeted and then left feeling as if they have played a part in what happened. Con artists, groomers, scammers and many politicians have always played this awful game. They prey on people and then rely on their victim’s shame and fear to guarantee their silence.
With the person I had been speaking to yesterday there had always been a sense that they moved as rapidly towards blaming themselves for a bad thing done to them as they did to the person who’d hurt them. A so-called friend who, for instance, might make demands of them and then say something like: ‘you never told me you didn’t want that’. Or: ‘if you didn’t like that why didn’t you say?’. My client would hear this and become angry with themself. They’d often feel weak or useless. They’d become angry at themselves. They felt and remained stuck.
They hadn’t been able to see something about the insight they had gained from our work together exploring their relationships. It needed to be applied to the future, not the past.
When trouble comes knocking in the form of a demanding, insistent character who seems incapable of imagining what might be in my client’s best interests my client needed to create distance. To take a look at how often this kind of thing was happening and maybe move on rather than remain stuck with a thought of what they hadn’t done to stand up for themselves; that they had been at fault, as if they almost needed to apologise to their thoughtless friend.
Insight needs to take us forwards, not back into a recriminatory past where we learned to blame ourselves for other people’s unthinkable behaviour. ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards,’ as Kierkegaard suggested (what he wrote1 was a little more complex). Freud said something similar, as did Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s: ‘We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.’2
There are a number of ways you can get stuck. Most of them involve ambivalence: holding contradictory positions at the same time (I love you and I hate you, for example), in equal amounts. To do this consciously is hard to imagine.
So let’s say there must be something unconscious about ambivalence; some absent influence, like a proxy voter, that’s affecting how decisions are made. Let’s go further and say that having two things, one called ‘unconscious’ and one called ‘ambivalence’ helps us make sense of something you’d imagine you’d be on to very quickly: ‘Hey, I’m thinking about starting and stopping at the same time. That’s not going to work.’
You don’t know what’s unconscious, but you can start to notice the effects.3
1. Kierkegaard, S. (1843). Volume 4, “Journals NB-NB5”.
2. Mcluhan, M. (1967). The Medium is the Message. Bantam Books.
3. I think of Freud’s unconscious in terms of the nervous system. He was confined to exploring ‘unconscious effects’ by the dogma of his day, where clinical observations – rather like now, actually – are thought of as unscientific. He had no access to the ways of measuring our bodies that neuroscientists have now. Time and time again Freud wrote about psychoanalysis as ‘provisional’. Let’s not forget that.
Our autonomic system responds to situations in ways it has become trained to by the force of our life experience. Each of us is capable of repetitive, extreme emotional experiences, as if we are being threatened, that another person might experience as innocuous.
