MIND MOVES:Good psychology helps us to see what we may be hiding from ourselves, writes TONY BATES.
PSYCHOLOGY holds a great gift for people in allowing us to get to know and become ourselves. It does this not so much by helping us to rise above our pain, our longing, our sense of something missing, but precisely because it can put us back in touch with those elements of our lives.
In the course of living we are inevitably going to get hurt. When this happens we can try to push our hurt away, insist that whatever happened was of no consequence, and hide our feelings in the shadow-world of our unconscious.
Not surprising really when you think about it. It seems perfectly understandable that we would resort to all kinds of behaviours to numb our inner pain and fabricate some version of “well-being”. But the problem is that these defensive coping mechanisms rarely work in the long term.
We try to live life according to how we imagine we “should” feel, speak and behave – someone else’s idea of “normal” – but we become strangers to ourselves. When we try to disown painful aspects of our lives, they can make their presence felt through all manner of “symptoms” that erupt repeatedly.
The unloved, unhealed parts of ourselves sit within our psyche like pebbles in shoes. They may not altogether stop us in our tracks, but they sure as hell slow us down and make everything we do a much greater strain than it probably needs to be. No matter how successfully we may think we’ve shifted into a place where they can do no harm, they send us painful reminders that they have not gone away.
Because there is a force for health in all of us that knows we cannot be at ease with ourselves until we are honest with ourselves. Our unconscious longs to be integrated.
Good psychology, whether dispensed through a therapist, a self-help book or a close friend, helps us to see what we may be hiding from ourselves. It exposes our fears – hopefully with some compassion – reveals the hurt that lies behind them, and encourages us to come to terms with them, rather than allow them to steal from us the opportunity to fully know who we are.
Good psychology also challenges simplistic approaches to human suffering that suggest it’s easy for people to “get beyond” ourselves, and to “get over ourselves”. I read in this supplement last week that we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of self-help books. In so many cases these books have been a great support to people and they deserve our appreciation for all of that.
But when they come at us with seductive titles that promise speedy and assured solutions to what we know are complex and deep-seated conundrums in our lives, they can leave the reader feeling like a failure when the liberation they promise fails to materialise.
Yet many of these books do help a great deal. They can enable people to be more honest with themselves and guide them in their struggle to make sense of why they may be feeling and acting the way they are.
One person, quoted in Charlie Taylor’s article last week, described the considerable benefit she derived from the self-help books she had read: “The books I found gave comfort were those that recognised how bad emotional pain can be, that it was OK to feel that pain and that gave me encouragement to believe you could get through it.”
This wonderful tribute is one that any self-help writer would hope to hear from a reader of their work. What struck me was how the person speaking had never lost sight of the fact that she would be the one to “get through” her problems. And the recognition she had that her recovery would take time.
Because the truth is that these books can never, as some of them promise, part the waters of confusion and lead us to the promised land.
A person may give up an addiction, address their fears, ease up on being a control-freak or relinquish harmful and destructive behaviours, but this is likely to place them at the beginning of a journey, rather than at its end.
Free from the grip of our compulsive defensive behaviours we stand poised to begin each day to live our lives in a more open and honest way. To do this requires inner strength and a lot of patience. Very few self-help books tell us about the territory we all have to cross between giving up negative ways of coping with our inner lives and rebuilding our identities and our relationships without them.
Poets know how tough it can be for humans to find themselves in that twilight existence where we are no longer hiding from the truth, but where we have are yet become reconciled with ourselves.
Their writings can touch us when we need encouragement to keep going. I am reminded of the words of Brendan Kennelly:
“Though we live in a world that dreams of ending,
That always seems about to give in,
Something that will not acknowledge conclusion,
Insists that we forever begin.”
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental health (headstrong.ie)