Gravity: Surviving Overwhelming Pain - B-side 

So the element I want to pick up on this time is the idea Anoushka and I touched on in the A-Side about what happens to Dr Ryan Stone in the film Gravity as a result of her not being able to face or confront the tremendous pain she feels following the death of her daughter.  

When life deals us pain, it can be tempting to try to push it down to avoid it, in fact, it can be almost impossible to do anything but push it away. We have lives to live, children to raise, obligations to fulfil – we don’t have time to fall apart, and even if we did, why do I want to give that pain more of my energy? 

But this episode is about what happens when we do shut ourselves down, and what happens when we decide to do the opposite and confront it all. 

One main principle of psychotherapy, dating even from way back in its early days with Jung and Freud, is to feel the feelings so they can be known, processed, integrated into our whole self. Gabor Mate says this beautifully in the excellent book The Myth of Normal: he says: healing simply means opening ourselves to the truth of our lives, past and present, as plainly and objectively as we can. We have knowledge where we were wounded and, as we are able, perform an honest audit of the impacts of those injuries as they’ve touched both our own lives, and those of others around us. 

And this is the truth of what happens in therapy. People perform honest audits of the impact of certain key events and relationships in their lives. 

People come into therapy at the point when their coping mechanisms that have worked their whole lives until now, start to cause problems. Because the thing is, coping strategies are rigid and inflexible, so the person who employs them can only function as long as the coping strategy functions. But life will almost always throw something at us which is too big for our little strategy to handle. So let’s imagine a person who has shielded themselves from their pain by believing that the world is shit and everyone in it is shit… That person will eventually feel so lonely that they may barely be able to carry on. Maybe the way this person’s soul dealt with the neglect and abandonment of their childhood was to shut things down, to not rely on people, to just expect very little from anyone, to construct a narrative that the world is cruel, people in it don’t look after one another, that nobody gives a shit about me. To heal, this person must face where they were not loved or cherished as they should’ve been in order to liberate themselves from this restrictive narrative.  

Here’s one scenario: Perhaps you are calling the therapist because you are having intrusive thoughts. The therapist will take you back through your past and take a deep dive into your narratives and your beliefs to find out what has had an impact. For someone with intrusive thoughts, this could be any number of things, here’s a common example: So, I’ve been a perfectionist all my life, it has served me well in school, at university and in landing my first job, but now I am out in the world, despite having everything I ever wanted, I just can’t ever feel like I am getting things right, or doing things well enough, or maybe I just can’t feel safe or secure. And lately, I’ve been plagued by intrusive thoughts about things going desperately wrong… So your intrusive thoughts are imagined scenarios which your mind is conjuring up to prevent a future pain. If I don’t have a problem to solve now, then I had better prepare for all future problems.  

Let’s take another example, more in-line with the shutdown of Ryan Stone in Gravity, of the person who suffered one huge and indescribably horrible loss. This may be a death, it may be the end of a relationship. Or maybe their childhood was such a field of ongoing trauma that they simply cannot bear to accept the truth of it. If this person doesn’t face the extent of the pain they avoided at the time, then they have to shut part of themselves down. Of course, you can’t just shut part of yourself down without consequences. When we shut out pain, we shut out joy too. We numb our whole self, not just the pain. And we are living from a place of inauthenticity, a place of fear, perhaps? So this person comes to therapy because they can no longer enjoy their life. They speak of being disillusioned, not able to enjoy things they feel they should be enjoying, like holidays, like their families and friends… Or they speak of needing to be distracted most of the day on their phones, or in a haze of drugs or alcohol or some other kind of external stimulation, such as sex or work. Addictions are shields against pain. 

So if this person wants to stop being addicted, to start being able to enjoy holidays or family, to stop their compulsion to work hard or their compulsion to use sex or distraction to ease heir pain then this person has to first feel that pain. OF COURSE, This is NOT EASY, at all.  

As soon as we remove the shield against pain, we are faced with the pain we were previously shielded from. And that can really hurt. We can feel like we are going mad, that we might never feel right again, that we are broken… None of these things are true, and of course going through this process with a therapist, will help you with the pacing of this process, and with your expectations of what is happening to you and inside you. They will be along side you to track your progress, to champion you as you start to emerge from your stuckness. 

Let’s look at one final example: Someone who has spent their entire adult life pleasing everyone else, saying yes when they don’t want to, finally wears themself out. They can’t keep saying yes or they are going to break. They come into therapy because they need it all to stop. They are angry with other people for making demands, angry with themself for not being able to say no… they maybe hate themself or think they are weak for not being able to keep offering help, so they come to therapy and speak from these two parts of themself:  

1.     the part that only knows how to help and please, and  

2.     the part which is exhausted, angry and full of self-hatred or hatred of others.  

Through the course of therapy we make a point of hearing those different parts so the person can grow closer to them both and find out which one they want to put more in control of their life.  

All so far so easy. The problem, or rather the difficulty, comes in looking at why that first part, the pleaser, came about in the first place. Somewhere along the line this person came to irresolutely believe that if they didn’t please everyone else then they wouldn’t be loved or worthy. And this is where the pain starts. So, there are truths that have been hidden, painful truths about how they felt.  

Let’s say our person came from a family where a parent was poorly, or in prison, or a sibling was disabled (or a really gifted athlete whose schedule was a dominant feature in the household), or perhaps there were just lots of younger siblings, or one parent was a full time carer for someone else… What could happen to our client in that situation is that they could very easily make themself indispensable, helping in whatever way they can. If they didn’t do that, if they didn’t accommodate all these family needs they could be accused of getting in the way, or just kind of forgotten about.  

So they make themselves indispensable. What has to then happen in therapy, in-line with the Gabor Mate quote at the beginning, healing simply means opening ourselves to the truth of our lives, past and present, as plainly and objectively as we can. We have knowledge where we were wounded and, as we are able, perform an honest audit of the impacts of those injuries as they’ve touched both our own lives, and those of others around us. So this person must then, in therapy, feel the weight of these burdens from the past. They have to face the terrible fear of being invisible, forgotten or neglected. They have to feel the full weight of that, take the inventory of that pain, and through doing this, they heal.  

It sounds a bit “ta-daaaaa”. And I suppose it is. I still believe that therapy is magic! 

Let me leave you with another Gabor Mate quote: If you haven’t got over it yet, perhaps you never will. Perhaps you don’t need to, you just need to allow yourself to be with it. 

See you next time.