What do we pay for not taking the psyche into account?
Why the attention and care of loved ones are not always enough, and how the psyche shapes our health, our relationships and our ability to bear loss.
Recently a friend of mine (after the death of someone close to her) told me: “I don’t understand how psychotherapy would help me… I think the attention and care of the people close to me will be enough.”
Yes! Without attention and care it is much harder to live at all, I thought. But I know how hard it can sometimes be for people in general, and for some analysands in our work, to cope with life. How little attention there is to feelings, to what has been lived through, to oneself. How there is no time and no knowledge for it. How it all gets preserved inside, lives chaotically and, never named, affects our states and our life as a whole. And I decided to write this post. What do we pay when we ignore our mental health?
Since I took up psychoanalysis (studying the theory and going through my own psychoanalytic process), I have arrived at two facts, confirmed by my own experience as an analysand and by the experience of the people I work with:
- The psyche is what the whole of life rests on! That is:
- physical health depends directly on the psychic state;
- what does or does not happen in relationships with loved ones, at work, with friends also depends on what is happening to a person psychically, including their personal history and their own experience (infantile above all, but sometimes current as well).
- The psyche and its current state, which always rests on all of a person’s previous experience, is the basis for how a person will bear the stresses, losses, challenges, tasks and situations we meet every day on our way, especially in such troubled times.
I go to my psychoanalyst twice a week to have a space for experiencing — for what I have no space and no time for amid everyday challenges.
With this space, I have the chance to grasp what affects me, what I suffer from, and what I cannot put into feelings on my own.
In these two meetings a week I keep up the psychic hygiene I need for working with my analysands. I also get the chance to answer questions I cannot always answer on my own, and thanks to my psychoanalyst’s position I can hear an honest silence, or a question, or an answer about what I am talking about — answers we cannot expect from the people around us. And it would be too painful if we got them there.
I know for certain that my psychoanalyst knows how the psyche works, what influence culture, other people, the environment and physiological processes have on psychic processes, how cunningly our psyche can sometimes give us pleasure from our suffering, and other interesting and very important things! But what happened to me in particular, nobody knows except me. And together we assemble my story, and it is in this very process that current problems meet and shed light on many moments from the past! This is exactly what makes it possible to work through, to process, to grasp a great deal of material that simply existed before and was given no attention, yet had an effect — chaotically, without explanations, and sometimes with convenient explanations that only got in the way.
It is the same with grief. A psychoanalyst knows exactly what the work of mourning is. And they can be beside you in a way that another person who does not know it can hardly be.
Do not be afraid of psy specialists. Because your psyche is exactly what creates your life in all its many forms: bodily, behavioural, emotional, and in what happens in your own reality.
I hope this text inspires someone to work with the psychic, not only with the body. Because for not taking the psyche into account, we pay with our body, our health and our whole life.