Given their inevitable reliance on their own limited resources, children pass through phases of various fears, quirks, beliefs, rituals, and ways of relating to the world. These adaptations ebb and flow, change, become dormant, and reappear. We all carry at least some of this baggage, some of this crazy-as-it-is-I’m-dealing-with-it-the-best-that-I-can, into adulthood, and we typically want to leave the contents of the baggage unexamined. It’s so hard to see one’s own blind spots and amazing how tenaciously most of us want to hold onto them.
There’s an aphorism that says, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” This is how I feel about psychoanalytic therapy. In my office, I see people all the time who have married so as to avoid deep involvement and then divorce because there wasn’t enough involvement; or who, unconsciously, are trying so hard to marry or to avoid marrying one of their parents, that they can’t make a relationship work with a partner; or who keep playing out, while trying not to, guilty and shameful revenges for childhood traumas great and small. Often they say to me, “I should have come to see you 20 years ago,” and I don’t disagree.
Why didn’t they? Most often it is because the uncomfortable feelings that people tend to have about their emotional struggles are carried forward from childhood into the present. People talk about the stigma of seeking help for emotional problems, but the most important, and overlooked, “stigma” is typically one’s own internal hesitations and self-deprecations. The statement “I need some help, and I’m going to get it” is seldom met with disrespect, but the shame of wanting or needing help with one’s mind is so great that few people are comfortable saying it.
When I was in college, I was as ashamed and scared of needing therapy as anyone else, but there were things troubling me that I couldn’t master. A little bit of psychotherapy at that time helped me recognize how little I understood about myself and my feelings toward my family – a very helpful start. More psychotherapy when I was a medical student helped more. Having a full psychoanalysis as I pursued training as a psychoanalyst provided a tremendously gratifying sense of finally really unraveling the tightest, most hidden emotional knots. How fortunate that I didn’t feel obliged to pretend that I was so grown up as to deprive myself of essential help from others.