Therapy does not concern hacks of life. The best solutions are simpler – and more complex | Mental health

WChicken people are looking for therapy – and I know, because I too was once a person looking for therapy – we often want strategies, techniques and tools for our tool boxes. We want to ask ourselves questions and know the answers; We want to ask questions and receive answers. We think these are the things we need to build a better life.

Now that I am a patient in psychoanalysis, and I am a psychodynamic psychotherapist who treats patients, I can see why my therapist had to frustrate this desire and offer me the opposite. What I wanted was to manage my emotions rather than feeling them, hacking my life rather than living it – and that makes a less deep existence, not a better.

Significant therapy helped me understand that what I wanted was not what I needed. That my search for the right answer, born from my conviction that there is a good way to make life, could only keep me stuck. I now see that this powerful treatment can offer something much more precious than strategies: a fertile environment in which a spirit can develop, so that a new space can open between detecting an emotional experience in you and having to get rid of it immediately. In this space, you can develop the ability to tolerate something that was previously experienced as unbearable – and that gives you time to feel, reflect and respond with the agency, rather than remaining a slave to your reactions.

This can be totally transformative for our relationships, for our professional life, for our parenting and for our self -respect. This is not something that we can try to do, it is not something that someone can tell us how to do it, it is not something that we can read in a newspaper article (even this one, I am afraid). It is the result of a significant and sustained therapeutic relationship, and there is no shortcut.

The fact is that strategies, techniques and tools are all available so that you can find if you want them. A quick search on the Internet will serve more studies than you could want to read, showing that the exercise is good for your mental health; This mindfulness can help manage stress (and there are many applications for this); And that if that makes you feel good, you can buy as many coloring books for adults, gratitude newspapers and weighted blankets as you wish (before you feel so weighed down by all your things that it is time to unclutter). These things may or not be useful or not, but the advice in this direction can also worsen a person, if what he really needs is to resolve the underlying difficulties, the anxieties, the depressions and the unconscious dynamics which deprive them of the capacity to enjoy the good things of life.

Because the thing about building a better life is that it is at the same time incredibly complex and incredibly simple. (One consequence of good psychotherapy – and Parenthood – is developing the capacity to recognize and feel Two Opposing Truths at the same time.) In a therapy session, an almot Imperceptible movement or sigh from a patient might, when attention is direct toward, open up a fascinating seam of Memories and Associations that Reveal Buried Pain and Love and Heartbreaking Assumption About Themselves, Which Developed In Their Mind in Childhood Out of Compelling Family Dynamics and have continued to Prrison them for their Entire Vies. And once these knotty dynamics have been excavated and understood, and the feelings trapped inside have been allowed to explain, then the cell door can open, as well as pain and anger and desire and other feelings, all kinds of beautifully simple things become possible. The feeling of hot sun happiness on your face. The colors of a painting by David Hockney. The supply of a chocolate hobnob. The noise of the heart of a little laughing – yours or that of someone else. The pleasure of exchanging a head sign with a stranger who also walked in the park. The joy of watching one of the greatest films of all time.

Which brings me to my last point. We must recognize that good therapy can be difficult to find (although there is a lot of information on bpc.org.uk). And if you live in a field where psychotherapy is, scandalously, not available on the NHS, or about to be cut, then it can be expensive (although there are low -fee programs at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the British Psychotherapy Foundation, and elsewhere). This type of therapy may also be useful for the moment. And, as I wrote previously, good therapy takes time, and there are rules in our lives when this time may not be available for us.

Fortunately, there is something else that can help. Here is the only strategy, technique and tool that I found that really works – the answer to almost all questions.

Look at Midnight Run.

And if you have already looked at this exquisite 80s comedy with Robert de Niro, Charles Grodin and Yaphet Kotto, then look at him.

And when you looked at him, find someone else who looked at him – the biggest value of the Internet may reside in his establishment to connect the people who watched Midnight Run – and exchange your favorite quotes and scenes with them.

And then make a cup of tea and dip a little chocolate gob and eat it.

You are welcome.

Moya Sarner is a psychotherapist of the NHS and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations with adults looking for adulthood