ohwhen you notice it, you feel it everywhere. This relentless, suffocating exhortation to be happier, to improve yourself, to become better – to build a better life. It might come from your parents, it almost certainly comes from the Instagram accounts you follow, you can even assume it comes from these columns. Most powerful of all, it probably comes from your own mind.
It might sound obvious, but I’m not sure it really is, so I’ll say it: there are times when life feels very difficult, painful, and overwhelming. When things go wrong, when things go right but it feels even worse, when the washing machine leaks and jobs are lost and homes are lost and people are lost and and and… when it takes all your energy just to survive. Telling yourself that you need to build a better life is not only exhausting, but cruel.
Sometimes this is the case when you least expect it – not when something bad has happened, but when something seemingly good has happened, but you feel bad nonetheless. Like when you’ve just moved in with your partner, and instead of the loving bliss you expected, you experience a panicked suffocation and intense hatred. Or, when, as I have seen with so many friends, and lived through myself, you have just had a much-desired baby, and instead of the predicted joy, you experience total exhaustion, periods of desolation and terribly painful breasts. Or when you just started college, or a new job, or therapy, or went on vacation. Right now you thought you would build a better life, but instead you feel lost and like life is falling apart.
To tell yourself at such moments that you must be happy and become happier, or to pretend to yourself that you are, is a callous lie. I know this because it’s one I told myself. It’s a kind of gaslighting of yourself, trying to subvert your own instincts and convince yourself that your internal reality is what you want it to be, rather than what it is. The truth is that you feel disappointment, anger and despair. It is a gift to yourself to recognize this. This truth, about what we really feel, is the most nourishing, important and valuable thing we can offer ourselves, and it is the foundation from which a better life can grow.
I have always been struck in my work by my patients’ ability to grow. Having experienced terrible trauma, neglect and other forms of abuse, and using therapy to continue to build a better life for themselves and their families.
Part of what I find most meaningful about being a therapist is inviting my patients to use me and the space I offer them to get to know themselves more deeply and more truly, so they can recognize the parts of themselves and understand who feels safer in situations that are abusive, who find relationships more comfortable when they are negligent. Unless backed by an unflinching emotional honesty about what you feel and think, including when things feel bad and difficult, the drive to build a better life can risk recreating the same one you’ve always known. only worse, because it happens again. You spin around in the same place, overwhelmed by forces you’re powerless to understand because you can’t see them. These forces have even more power over you when you tell yourself that everything is great when it isn’t.
A friend who, like me, is a patient in psychoanalysis, put it so well when she said: “What I appreciate so much about my analyst is that when I talk to her about some ugly part of myself which feels something awful that I don’t like, she doesn’t reassure me or tell me not to worry. She takes it seriously, she understands it as part of the human experience, she doesn’t judge me for it but she doesn’t let me off the hook either. She thinks about it with me.”
I can’t stop thinking about a news story I heard over the summer. The world’s largest iceberg, A23a, spins in circles, caught in a powerful vortex deep in the ocean. This story is compelling because it is so relatable: sometimes we can all find ourselves trapped, trapped, held down by unconscious forces that we cannot see, but which nevertheless seem to control our destiny, holding us back from development and growth, and the inevitable losses that follow. The difference is that we, not an iceberg, can have thoughts and feelings about our circumstances, understand something about the unconscious forces that hold us down, and ultimately find whatever agency we have in our situation to alter.
It all starts with admitting that sometimes you feel bad, and that’s the truth.
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Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I grow up – conversations with adults in search of adulthood
