Superficiality & Good Mental Health Don’t Mix

One of the goals of analysis, according to Sigmund Freud, was to move from hysterical misery to everyday unhappiness.  Rollo May insisted the clinician's task is to awaken and confront the patient’s demons, not put them to sleep.  And Carl Jung believed it’s the demons we don’t face which make us sick.  What a marketing campaign for good mental health!  “Come on in! Face your inner demons!  It might feel uncomfortable at first, and will surely take some work, but in the end, you can achieve everyday unhappiness!”

Of course, that marketing plan won’t catch on.  It’s not just that we reside in a quick fix, positive psychology culture; but we are, by design, wired to avoid that which is painful, and seek out that which is pleasurable and familiar.  We’d rather not “go there”. 

The problem, of course, is that the pain we’d rather avoid doesn’t cease to exist just because we cease and desist.  Pain is a signal that something is wrong: there is a wound somewhere in need of healing, and pain draws your attention to it.  One of the concerns of solely using medication to treat emotional illness is that it removes the symptoms of pain (depression, anxiety, rage) without healing the wound (loss, betrayal, abandonment).  Often times the medicated symptom will vanish only to reappear down the road in a new form.

The other problem with the “no-pain zone” is that what is “pleasurable and familiar” may not always correlate with the good.  For example: perhaps what is familiar is structuring your life in a disorganized fashion so that you are always a disappointment to yourself?  Or, perhaps what is pleasurable is a gallon of ice cream for breakfast?  To some, toxic relationships are as familiar and cozy as a warm bath.

Getting back to the demons.  There are a variety of reasons why we’d rather avoid them; most prefer to flee.  We flee because we despise and feel ashamed of these troubling parts of ourselves.  We flee because we fear our feelings or wishes might transgress the boundary of what is moral and acceptable.  We have troubling thoughts or feelings about ______ (you fill in the blank) and we become frightened.  “Surely, that is not I!”  “I love (him, her, it) and would never desire such a thing!”  We flee because we believe that to have unacceptable thoughts or feelings must mean that we are constitutionally unacceptable.

Sometimes we avoid the demons because exposing and transforming them would mean relinquishing unconscious loyalties – often to one’s parents.  Children will often do whatever is necessary to maintain a connection with the parent.  This means if the parent is emotionally unavailable or persecutory, the child will learn ways to accommodate that parent in order to maintain a connection, no matter how tenuous.  This typically involves some developmental compromise on the child’s part, such as locating the “badness” inside themselves, or only expressing feelings that are tolerable to the parent.  Transforming and healing these accommodating aspects (in the adult) can be the psychological equivalent of abandoning the parent.

Some try to lock up the demons and ghosts and banish them to a box in the cellar. But what happens? Well, those despised and humiliating imprisoned aspects of ourselves live on, dig a tunnel out and show up anyway.  They show up in our compulsion to repeat early traumas or bad relationships, (e.g. new versions of old problems).  They show up when we undermine or sabotage ourselves.  They show up in emotional explosions that wreak all sorts of collateral damage.

Which brings us to everyday unhappiness.  Freud comes in and out of fashion depending on what decade you’re living in.  He’s been pronounced dead a few times.  Some young people who’ve read a Wikipedia entry fault him for focusing on sex and aggression a lot but…have you read the news lately?  Perhaps he was on to something.  Perhaps moving from hysterical misery to everyday unhappiness means dealing with, and accepting the limitations of life on its own terms, and not life as we wish it would be.  By mourning that which we have lost, or that which never was, or never will be, allows us to be happy for what is good, and unhappy about that which we should be unhappy about (again, have you read the news lately?).  It also frees us from being miserable about that which we cannot control (e.g., I want my parent/partner/boss to change, I want to be king, etc.).  By relinquishing omnipotent wishes, by mourning losses, by listening to the pain in our lives, we can learn to tolerate the less pleasant aspects of our personality and move from a superficial to richer understanding of ourselves.  Confronting those demons and ghosts may not be quick, and will certainly not be pain free, but doing so can free us to love, create, and experience all the joys and sorrows that comprise a life.