This article explores the tendency to prioritize others' needs at the expense of our own and the detrimental effects of suppressing our vulnerabilities. It delves into the author's personal journey of self-discovery through psychoanalysis, highlighting the importance of acknowledging and addressing our unconscious motivations.
Do you lavish attention on others but rarely receive it? It’s time to get in touch with your own needs Protecting yourself from the feelings that drive you may give you a sense of control – but it comes at a cost. Working through them allows you to lower your defencesRecently I was walking to a session with my psychoanalyst when I realised I had just put my hand in my pocket to take out my house key.
Something I have learned from experience, as a patient in my analyst’s consulting room, and as a therapist to patients in my own consulting rooms, is that to build a better life you have to make your unconscious conscious. One of the many things my analyst is helping to bring into consciousness for me is how, without realising it, I act as if it were me who is the therapist, and she who is my patient, rather than the other way around. Session by session, micro-interaction by micro-interaction, she observes and interprets the ways in which, despite myself, I seek to escape my own position of being the patient, attempting to use her as a pawn in this unconscious chess I play. Often when she offers me her thoughts about this, I immediately reject them – I don’t want to know. It has taken a long time, but I can see now that I am recreating with her the dynamic I have carried since my early years, of feeling that I was the grownup taking care of everyone else – the one holding the key – rather than the child who needed care and worried about her poorly dad. This was a way to feel in control of a situation that was quite overwhelming and frightening for me. This dynamic that shapes many of my relationships – of seeking to be the one who offers care and never the one receiving it – is so hard to lay to rest because it protects me from awareness of my own vulnerabilities. It is far more comfortable than actually being in touch with my own needs – but it comes at a cost. Because the part of me that does need attending to, that yearns for care and attention, goes neglecte
Self-Care Unconscious Vulnerability Relationships Therapy
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