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X-Rated Subjects, X-Ray Vision
X-Rated Subjects
There are some subjects which are particularly challenging for many people to raise in therapy, and which can be enormously useful when they do. In my experience, they probably include the following (in alphabetical order):
Dreams – Whether because they’re sexual, violent, or both, people fear that dreams are too revealing of their desires and instincts rather than pointers to feelings and processes.
Embarrassments – There can be a fear that the therapist won’t be able to deal with embarrassing material from the past or present. If we’re any good, we’ll be fine, no least because embarrassment is very subjective.
Feelings for Therapist – If you love us, you fear we’ll reject you. If you hate us, you fear we’ll reject you. If you lust after us, you think we’ll reject you. If you imagine we’re awful people you may want to reject us. If you imagine we’re the best person who ever lived then you’ll feel unworthy of us… There’s no end of reasons for avoiding expressing our feelings towards our therapists, and most of them come down to fears of rejection.
Kink – All of us have aspects of our sexuality or emotional make-up which we feel are unusual or illicit or shameful, and many of these are useful routes into understanding ourselves more generally. But that’s not how it feels when the subject of our personal tastes comes up.
Masturbation – With the possible exception of dreams, there is nothing which is more private, more about our relationship with ourselves, and more shrouded in mystery. As such it often feels incredibly difficult to talk about. When people do, it is often more illuminating than humiliating.
Self-Harm – Whether because it’s so distressing, so normalised, too shameful or too risky to share, self-harm is frequently a hard topic for clients to talk about in any detail, even if the role of it in their lives is often part of the reason they have come to therapy in the first place. But like all subjects, it is not something to be afraid of but to be interested in.
Sex – Therapy, like sex, is an intimate act. How someone feels about talking about it to their therapist often mirrors how they feel about the act itself: ‘a subject like any other’, ‘tricky but fine once it gets going’, or ‘terrifying at every stage’.
Shame – A possible umbrella term for everything on this list, shame thrives in the dark. If it’s hard to talk about it’s usually about shame. If it’s shameful it’s probably been hidden from view and unspoken for a very long time. There are few subjects more appropriate for therapeutic enquiry.
Toileting – All of us have a relationship with the lavatory and its related bodily functions. (For instance we use phrases like “bodily functions” because saying “peeing and pooing” feels too embarrassing.) For some people how our bowels function, or don’t, offers amazing parallels with our emotional stability at the time. To notice one is to get in touch with the other.
Violence – Whether it’s violence experienced (domestic abuse, sexual assault, corporal punishment, bullying, inappropriate touching) or violence fantasised (intense anger, fantasies of hurting or harming someone else) violence is a tough topic for many people to acknowledge, and in my experience is more often hinted at than outright-expressed.
X-Ray Vision
A few weeks after I began therapy, many years ago, I said to my therapist: “This is great. I say stuff and you read my mind.” She smiled. She’d surely heard it many times before.
Therapists do not have X-ray vision, but sometimes it feels as if they do.
For Xander, early interactions sometimes feel like this.
Xander So my wife said this thing to me last week and I don’t really know what she meant or what she said but it made me feel weird, kinda tight; I just… I can’t understand why she would accuse me of something like that. It made me feel, kinda, well, you know, (pulls a face) a bit.
Therapist It sounds like you were quite angry with her.
Xander Jesus, how the hell did you know that?
Whereas for a therapist the same conversation can feel more like this.
Xander: So my wife said this offensive thing to me, about which most people would reasonably feel angry, and I’m not very comfortable with expressing anger but I feel tension in my body. I didn’t know why she’d say this angry-making feeling to me, but it made me feel kinda (angry face)fuck you, that’s made me fucking angry.
Therapist It sounds like you were quite angry with her.
Xander Jesus how the hell did you know that?
Xander is not an idiot: what’s obvious to the therapist is not in the awareness of the client. He can express himself in code and in facial expressions and even in body experiences but he can’t locate the word ‘anger’ yet.
The therapist is not a mind-reader. Contrary to the impression some people form of therapists (loads of people say to me at parties “Ah I must watch what I say!” as if I’m going to Derren Brown them) we are not mind-readers. We are just very experienced at paying close attention to what you say and how you say it, and trying to get to the essence of what is being communicated.
When a therapist appears to have X-ray vision and is able to speak as if directly from your deepest psyche, it’s probably because you’ve just said something very clear to them; it’s just you didn’t quite hear yourself say it.
Next Week: Y
Yes; You.