my family was recently taken down by a cruel stomach disease. It took us out one by one, and although nothing could be more predictable in a household with a child who recently started kindergarten, the biblical brutality of the symptoms surprised me. I think I better leave it.
While I have recovered physically, I am still reeling from the psychological vulnerability of feeling so helpless, of having no control over my own body. So I thought about control, how terrifying it is to feel out of it, how we kid ourselves for being in it. People often talk about feeling out of control – of their thoughts, their emotions, their relationships – and this is something that comes up a lot in therapy, whether I’m the patient or the therapist. The assumption seems to be that to build a better life, you have to be in control of it; the truth is, this desperation to be in control can destroy our lives and the lives of those we love.
This wish to be in control is not always consciously spoken in the consulting room; this can be communicated unconsciously, for example through a patient’s late arrival, so that I as a therapist experience the gift of waiting, and they don’t have to endure the feeling of being out of control of when the session starts. Or they may talk about their experience only in the language of diagnoses – not to explore with me, in the voice of a patient, how they really feel, but declare, in the voice of a psychiatrist, that they have, for example, OCD or ADHD, or an eating disorder, as if that’s the end of it. Closing the door to their experience, rather than opening it and inviting me in.
There is a high cost to all of this. When a patient arrives late, they lose precious minutes of the session. When they hide inside a diagnosis and close the door on me, they are denying themselves the care that a part of them also wants.
This cost is always higher in other areas of the patient’s life because it is the nature of a relentless quest for control: it makes it so difficult to let anyone else in. We can end up isolated and crushingly lonely, in absolute rule of our empty realm of one. And we can trap others – our partners, colleagues, children – in our frantic pursuit of mastery of everything.
Why are we like this? I think we need to go back to the beginning and the trauma of being born so incredibly out of control. Babies live in a world of things that happen to them; of bodily functions and hunger that feel shocking, painful and monstrous, of nappy changes and baths and clothes that seem to come from nowhere. No wonder they cry so much and so loudly.
Loving parents will try to soften this terrifying feeling of being out of control by responding as best they can to their baby’s distress, cuddling and feeding when they cry for milk. But all parents are sometimes overwhelmed by the primal and all-consuming needs of a brand new being. It’s not just babies who need to develop the ability to be out of control.
As a therapist, I find this a helpful way to think about the many different constellations of symptoms that patients bring – not just the alphabet soup of diagnoses mentioned above, but also people who become controlling partners, or who repeatedly find themselves in relationships found with controlling partners, and other problems too. Perhaps all these ways of relating to ourselves and others are linked to the trauma of being born without control, and the desperate, dangerous wish to have it; the belief that we should have it
The ability to tolerate not being in total control is essential to building a better life, not just for babies and parents, but for all of us. It can feel like being in or out of control are the only options, but that’s not the case. There is an alternative. I felt this in the presence of my psychoanalyst, who offers me an atmosphere of freedom of feeling and thought, where emotions do not have to be controlled, but can be understood, meaningful.
The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion described this state as “contained”. He theorized that a loving parent, by holding their baby in their arms and in their mind, by trying, and sometimes failing, to make sense of whatever the baby is experiencing and to symbolize it, to put it into words to sit, can become the container for their baby’s overwhelming feelings. It is this instinctive gift, from the parents who are able to give it, that ultimately allows the baby to contain themselves. Not in control or out of it, but contained.
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If we give in to the compulsion to try to be in control at all times, we lose the most valuable parts of ourselves: the parts that need freedom to come alive. Our appetite – for food, sex, life and love. Our imagination and our creativity, whether artistic, entrepreneurial, culinary or playful. Our emotions, which reveal to us who we are and where we want to go, and who we want to go there with.
This vomiting bug left me so shaky, I think, because it took away from me the illusion I sometimes hide in, that I am now an adult, in control of my life, of my mind, in control of what to do with happen to me The truth is much more disturbing, unpredictable and liberating.
Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I grow up – Conversations with adults in search of adulthood
