Do you tell yourself that you are happier than you are? Stop the gaslighting

OAs soon as you notice it, you feel it everywhere. This relentless, suffocating drive to be happier, to improve yourself, to become better – to build a better life. It could come from your parents, it almost certainly comes from the Instagram accounts you follow, you might even assume it comes from these columns. Most powerful of all, it probably comes from your own mind.

It may sound obvious, but I’m not sure if it really is, so I’ll say it: there are times when life feels really hard, painful, and overwhelming. When things go wrong, when things go right, but that feels even worse, when the washing machine leaks and jobs are lost, homes are lost and people are lost and and and… when it takes all your energy to survive. Telling yourself to build a better life is not only exhausting, but also cruel.

Sometimes this happens when you least expect it – not when something bad has happened, but when something seemingly good has happened, but you still feel bad. For example, when you’ve just moved in with your partner and instead of the amorous bliss you expected, you experience panicky suffocation and intense hatred. Or, when, as I’ve seen with so many friends and experienced myself, you’ve just had a baby you’ve been longing for, and instead of the predicted joy, you experience total exhaustion, periods of abandonment, and unbearably sore breasts. Or if you have just started studying, or have a new job, or are going to therapy, or are on holiday. The moment you thought you were building a better life, you feel lost and like life is falling apart.

In moments like these, it’s a heartless lie to tell yourself to be happy and become happier, or to pretend to yourself that you are. I know this because I have said this to myself. It’s a kind of gaslighting of yourself, to try to undermine your own instincts and convince yourself that your internal reality is what you want it to be, rather than what it is. The truth is that you feel disappointment, anger and despair. It is a gift to yourself to recognize this. This truth, about what we really feel, is the most nourishing, important and valuable thing we can offer ourselves, and it is the foundation from which a better life can grow.

In my work I have always been struck by the growth potential of my patients. To have experienced terrible trauma, neglect and other forms of abuse, and to use therapy to build a better life for themselves and their families.

Part of what I find most meaningful about being a therapist is inviting my patients to use me and the space I offer them to know themselves more deeply and better, so that they can recognize and understand the parts of themselves who feel more secure in their lives. situations that are abusive, that relationships are more comfortable when they are neglectful. Unless it is backed by unwavering emotional honesty about what you feel and think, even when things feel bad and difficult, the drive to build a better life can risk recreating the same life you always have known, but worse. because it’s happening again. You spin around in the same place, overwhelmed by forces you cannot understand because you cannot see them. These forces have even more power over you if you tell yourself everything is great when it is not.

A friend who, like me, is a patient in psychoanalysis, put it so well when she said: ‘What I appreciate about my analyst is that when I talk to her about an ugly part of myself that feels something terrible that I doesn’t like it, she doesn’t reassure me or tell me not to worry. She takes it seriously, she understands it as part of the human experience, she doesn’t judge me for it, but she doesn’t let me get off track either. She thinks about it with me.”

I can’t stop thinking about a news story I heard last summer. The world’s largest iceberg, A23a, spins in circles, trapped in a powerful vortex deep in the ocean. This story is compelling because it is so relatable: sometimes we are all captured, trapped, held in place by unconscious forces that we cannot see, but which nevertheless seem to control our fate, holding us back from development and growth, and from the inevitable losses that follow. The difference is that because we are not an iceberg, we can have thoughts and feelings about our circumstances, come to understand something about the unconscious forces that keep us stuck, and ultimately find every opportunity we have in our situation to change it .

It all starts with recognizing that sometimes you feel bad, and that’s the truth.

Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and author of When I grow up – Conversations with adults in search of adulthood