My family was recently taken down by a brutal stomach bug. It took us out one by one, and although nothing could be more predictable in a household with a child who has recently started nursery, the biblical brutality of the symptoms took me by surprise. I think I had better leave it at that.
While I have recovered physically, I am still reeling from the psychological vulnerability of feeling so helpless, of having no control over my own body. So I have been thinking about control, how frightening it is to feel out of it, how we kid ourselves that we are in it. People often speak of feeling out of control – of their thoughts, their emotions, their relationships – and it’s something that comes up a lot in therapy, whether I am the patient or the therapist. The assumption seems to be that to build a better life, you have to be in control of it; the truth is, this desperation to be in control can destroy our lives and the lives of those we love.
This wish to be in control is not always spoken about in the consulting room in a conscious way; it can be communicated unconsciously, for example, through a patient’s late arrival, so that I, as the therapist, am the one given the experience of being left waiting, and they do not have to endure the feeling of being out of control of when the session begins. Or they might speak of their experience only in the language of diagnoses – not exploring with me, in the voice of a patient, how they really feel, but declaring, in the voice of a psychiatrist, that they have, for example, OCD or ADHD, or an eating disorder, as if that is the end of it. Closing the door on their experience, rather than opening it and inviting me in.
There is a high cost to all of this. When a patient arrives late, they lose precious minutes of the session. When they hide inside a diagnosis and close the door to me, they deny themselves the care a part of them also wants.
These costs are always higher in other areas of the patient’s life because that is the nature of a relentless search for control: it makes it so difficult to let anyone else in. We can end up isolated and crushingly lonely, in absolute dominion of our empty empire of one. And we can trap others – our partners, colleagues, children – in our frantic striving to be master of all.
Why are we like this? I think we have to go back to the beginning and the trauma of being born so incredibly out of control. Infants live in a world of things happening to them; of bodily functions and hunger that feel shocking, painful and monstrous, of nappy changes and baths and clothing that seem to come from nowhere. No wonder they cry so much and so loudly.
Loving parents will try to mitigate this terrifying sense of being out of control by responding as best they can to their baby’s distress, cuddling and feeding when they cry for milk. But all parents are at times overwhelmed by the primal and all-consuming needs of a brand new being. It is not only babies who need to develop the capacity to bear being out of control.
As a therapist I find this a useful way to think about the many different constellations of symptoms that patients bring – not just the alphabet soup of diagnoses mentioned above but also people who become controlling partners, or who repeatedly find themselves in relationships with controlling partners, and other difficulties too. Perhaps all these ways of relating to ourselves and to others are linked by the trauma of being born with no control, and the desperate, dangerous wish to have it; the belief that we should have it.
The ability to tolerate not being in total control is essential to building a better life, not just for infants and parents but for all of us. It can feel like being in or out of control are the only options, but that is not the case. There is an alternative. I have felt it in the presence of my psychoanalyst, who offers me an atmosphere of freedom of feeling and of thought, where emotions do not have to be controlled but can be understood, meaningful.
The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion described this state as “contained”. He theorised that a loving parent, by holding their baby in their arms and in their mind, by trying, and sometimes failing, to make sense of whatever the baby is experiencing and to symbolise it, to put it into words, can become the container for their infant’s overwhelming feelings. It is this instinctive gift, from the parents who are able to give it, that ultimately allows the baby, eventually, to contain themselves. Not in control or out of it, but contained.
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If we give in to the compulsion to try to be in control at all times, we lose the most valuable parts of ourselves: the parts that need freedom to come alive. Our appetite – for food, sex, life and love. Our imagination and our creativity, whether artistic, entrepreneurial, culinary or playful. Our emotions, which reveal to us who we are and where we want to go, and who we want to go there with.
This vomiting bug left me so wobbly, I think, because it took from me the illusion I occasionally hide away in, that I am now an adult, in control of my life, of my mind, in control of what happens to me. The truth is far more unsettling, unpredictable and liberating.
Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood
