M y 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 v.