From A Bitter Share To A Taste Of Life

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In the footsteps of a recent Interviser group, I pondered the phenomenology of suffering. Quite often, the therapist "swallows" the client's entire verbal construction: "I suffer", and begins to try, with all his might, to save the client from suffering. To be honest, it happened to me … So the process can circulate for a long time, without tangible results, and the therapist gets irritated and exhausted, while the client regularly goes to therapy, enthusiastically depicting his suffering from session to session.

Almost a textbook example: a young woman, married, has a child of school age, "suffers" from love addiction to another man for 4 years. The man gives her attention, then rejects.

At the same time, she defines him as her lover, is very afraid of losing relations with him and from day to day floods him with a flurry of SMS. At the same time, the client lives in a small town and is terribly afraid that others, incl. At the same time, they have no sex, according to the client, and the one that was - only a couple of times, did not bring pleasure for a long time. At the same time, he says that he receives attention from the "lover", which is not enough from the spouse. There is clearly a lot of pent-up arousal in the field. Behind the scenes is the fact that allowing oneself a secret love affair is essentially a "light in the window", the only way to allow oneself something in this life for oneself, in addition to caring for a child, a husband for whom there is a lot of resentment and repressed disgust, and unloved work, once chosen for her by her mother.

The process between shame and arousal, the fear of showing oneself, in front of another adult, attractive woman (therapist), as an adult woman capable of experiencing adult female pleasures (after all, they can shame and reject, or they may have to compete). "Suffering" is, in this case, a safe way to get attention from the mother's figure.

This is the logic of the sent bitter female share. If there is a taboo on pleasures inside, you have to complain, when in fact you could boast)) And live with the secret hope of receiving the "order of the martyr."

Following the group discussion, I thought about the importance of finding out what the client actually tells us, from time to time talking about his suffering. What place does the idea of suffering take in his / her worldview, value system?

After all, many of our value orientations live in us implicitly, not manifested. We may be ashamed to speak about them out loud, sometimes even admit to ourselves. But, nevertheless, they largely determine our life choices, the results of which often do not correspond to our conscious desires.

For example, in the near-Christian picture of the world there is an idea that suffering purifies and elevates. Sometimes you can hear that to those whom God loves, He gives difficult trials, and that you must carry your cross, no matter what. The life attitudes of the generation of “builders of communism” are similar, because they carry the idea of putting life on the “altar” and censure of any “egoism”. You can imagine how a client's relationship of this kind would develop with a therapist who also has unconscious New Age hedonistic attitudes.

On the other hand, a person who has a worldview closer to the Buddhist tradition can consider any suffering as a manifestation of an unenlightened state of consciousness. If this idea is joined by the pseudo-spiritual idea of positive thinking - a person can reproach himself for any negative emotion, trying to suppress it immediately, using the "heavy artillery" of spiritual practices, as in the previous example, not allowing himself to be alive, living the whole gamut of human feelings.

Variations can be very different, far from always these are introjects of the parental family. After all, we, for the most part, grow in the absence of clear, non-contradictory attitudes about how to live, what values are considered absolute and how to build relationships. Therefore, we each "sculpt" their own system of values from "scrap materials" (books, films, trainings, the Internet …), as if we were building a building: part of a village hut, part of a Victorian mansion, part of a high-tech office center. At the same time, our attention and emotions highlight us one or the other of its fragments, there is not enough reflection to move away to a certain distance and see this structure as a whole, and, horror (!), How to live with all this. Good therapy allows us to see our "construction", with all its oddities and contradictions, more or less holistically (does it look more like a bunker, or not a Gothic cathedral …), and on the basis of this new vision, decide how to use and carry out this construction redevelopment if necessary. Then, look, an isolated dull bunker may turn out to be a wine cellar filled with many tastes and aromas, where "suffering" may be just one of the many flavor notes in the bouquet of an exquisite drink.