A Therapist’s Case for Not Figuring You Out
I imagine readers familiar with psychotherapy might think ‘What a weird title for a therapist to write’. After all, isn’t psychotherapy all about getting to know yourself? To understand yourself? Well, yes – but perhaps not in the way that we so often think of. Bear with me on this.
Let’s start with two imagined scenarios.
A couple from London are on holiday in Australia. They have travelled to the other end of the globe to see a different place, full of new things to experience. They are staying in Kakadu national Park and one evening, while his partner reads in bed, the man goes out to the deck, lies on his back, inhales the scent of eucalyptus and looks up at the night sky. He is greeted by the jaw-dropping sight of the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon. Lying there, he recalls an old physics lesson when he learnt the breadth of the Milky Way, how many stars it contains and the massive black hole at its centre. He has a flush of satisfaction at having this knowledge, pleased that he somehow has the measure of it. After a minute, he goes back inside to tell his partner about the amazing physics of the galaxy… while the Milky Way remains overhead – huge and full of wonder.
But we don’t only do this with galaxies…
The same couple are back in the UK, sitting at the breakfast table on a Saturday morning. She is watching her partner butter toast, and wishing, as she often does, that he was a bit less settled in his routine. She doesn’t look at him exactly, rather she consults what she knows as she watches him. She can tell you how he takes his coffee, how he’ll vote, what he’ll say about the weather, how he’ll respond to her wish to go for a walk. Her file on him is thick and accurate. She reaches for it the same way he reached for his file on the Milky Way: and she experiences a similar small ‘click’ – she has the measure of him. She answered the wonder of him years ago, and that answer sits where he used to be.
What happened here? It’s not that the man’s facts about the Milky Way are not interesting, or even mind-blowing. It’s not that the woman shouldn’t know her partner. The man in the above scenario did not stop looking at the Milky Way – but he stopped experiencing it as he replaced it with his knowledge of it. The woman in the above scenario has not stopped looking at her partner – but she participates less with him, as her sense of him becomes full of her answers.
Neither of them is wrong. It is not that their internal files on the Milky Way or each other are inaccurate. And there is nothing wrong with wanting answers to questions in many realms of enquiry. Indeed, falsifiable truth is the cornerstone of science, and science has enriched and improved the lives of much of humanity. So, let’s accept that knowledge and answers are a crucial aspect of making sense of life and the world.
But such knowledge does not answer everything. John Vervaeke introduces four modes of knowing – propositional (factual knowledge), procedural (how to do things), perspectival (the felt sense of what it is like to be in a situation/place) and participatory (knowing by being in and shaped by the relationship – knowing by participation not observation). In over-privileging propositional knowledge, knowing the facts and the answers, it becomes easier to stop participating. It becomes harder to inhabit another’s perspective. We think less about the processes of life. We generally stop wondering about things when we think we have the answer or the measure of it.
When it comes to how we treat each other, the philosopher Martin Buber suggests that we turn people into a sort of “it” rather than a “you”. And in doing so we become alienated from the person we have reduced to an it – a set of propositions. I think this happens in part by losing wonder, by reduction to propositional things to be figured out. We start to see people, including loved ones, as our model of them rather than allowing them to be partly unknown – an ongoing source of mystery and wonder.
Not all questions demand an answer – or have an answer. But in the West we have come to treat every question as a demand for an answer. The problem is the word ‘every’ in this sentence. Every question does not have or demand an answer. Unfortunately, psychotherapy can contribute to this myth. Or at least the popularised social media version of psychotherapy can. It tells you that you are understandable, solvable… fixable. It may tell you that you are: traumatised/ narcissistically wounded/ avoidantly attached/ etc.
But none of these are the ‘answer’ or ‘fix’ to you. They may shed light on you. They may help you understand some of your behaviours, or patterns of thinking and emotional response. They may help you adjust things. But you will never be fully explained… and that is not a bad thing. At no point do I sit in the therapy room with a client and think ‘Ah, I have got them fully figured out’. I am constantly being with clients, participating in life with them, grappling with their world, my world and our shared world. Uncovering the next question. Wondering with them.
To help illustrate, let me turn to the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For those unfamiliar, it is a science-fiction comedy that pokes fun at the human need for meaning. The protagonists build a super-computer to uncover the meaning of ‘life, the universe and everything’. After seven and a half million years the computer finally arrives at the answer – “42”!! Well, that wasn’t worth 7.5 million years! Just as 42 is not the answer to the meaning of life, neither is ADHD or anxiety the answer to you. You do not have an ‘answer’. I think Douglas Adams, the author of Hitchhiker’s, was not making fun of the question so much as the demand for an answer. In a similar way, I think asking questions of and about yourself is not a problem – but expecting a full and final answer to yourself is to reduce yourself, or others, to Buber’s “It”.
I believe wonder is the well from which questions arise. Newton wondered about his apple and what that meant for the universe (turns out Newtonian physics wasn’t the final answer), Plato wondered what makes a good citizen, Rumi wondered about love, Freud wondered about the mind. I wonder about the nature of relationship. But answers do not bring the curtain down on wonder.
Rainer Maria Rilke famously suggests that we live the questions rather than try to live the answers – he leaves open the possibility that this may lead to answers. I suggest that the answers are not the purpose of the questions and that even if and when questions are answered, wonder does not stop. The physicist Richard Feynman suggested that knowing scientific facts about a flower actually adds to the excitement, mystery and awe of a flower. It opens further questions.
As a new therapist I was guided by Socrates’ injunction to “Know thyself”. And this was how I worked with clients – I wanted clients to have the answers so they could fix themselves. However, I had not understood Socrates. He was also famous for saying how little he knew. Indeed, his wisdom is often ascribed to the insight that most of the world remained beyond him. He said that “an unexamined life is not worth living”… he never said that “an unanswered life is not worth living”.
So, I will continue to practise wonder and to be in wonder. I will examine and ask questions, letting answers arise where they will, letting them change me where they do and being open to new questions. And where no answers arise, I will continue to hold the open question without demanding an answer… How is this impacting this person? What does that person value? What do I think is enough? How does my partner truly experience me? I wonder…