What Will I Say to a Psychotherapist?

Photo © Yury Li-Toroptsov

A friend called me recently, the kind of call that arrives without warning and carries real weight. He needed to talk, and so we talked, for a long time, about something that had been troubling him for years now, one of those recurring difficulties that never quite resolves itself, that resurfaces at different moments of a life with the same insistence and the same discomfort. I listened, as one does with a friend, though I was aware throughout that my being a psychoanalyst in training made the conversation something more layered than an ordinary exchange between two people who know each other well.

At a certain point I asked him, gently, whether he had ever considered speaking with a psychologist or a psychotherapist about what he was describing. The question seemed natural to me, even obvious, given the depth and the persistence of what he was sharing. His answer stopped me.

"What would I say to a psychotherapist? I have nothing to say."

I have heard this before, and more than once. The phrasing varies slightly from person to person, but the underlying movement is always the same: a quick retreat from the idea, dressed up as practicality. I wouldn't know where to start. There isn't really that much to say. It's not serious enough. What strikes me each time is how little we question the sentence itself, how rarely we pause to notice that "I have nothing to say" is, in fact, an enormously revealing statement about the relationship we have with our own inner life.

The threshold of pain

There is something here about thresholds. We are all of us, in some way, calibrating the level of suffering that justifies asking for help, and most of us have set that threshold very high, perhaps impossibly high. The implicit logic runs something like this: going to see a professional is for people with real problems, serious problems, problems that have a name and a diagnosis, and what I am experiencing does not yet qualify. What I am experiencing is simply life, and life is supposed to be difficult, and one is supposed to manage.

But consider what this logic requires of us. It requires that we become the sole judges of our own pain, that we assess its legitimacy from within the very perspective that is causing us suffering, and that we deliver a verdict of insufficiency before anyone else has even had the chance to listen. We dismiss ourselves before we have been heard. We are, as it turns out, the first person to refuse to validate our own feelings, and we do so with a kind of quiet efficiency that we would never apply to someone else in the same situation.

If a friend described to you what your friend describes to you, would you tell him he has nothing to say?

Fear, dressed as indifference

What I have come to believe, through my own experience and through the theoretical frameworks I have been immersed in during my training, is that "I have nothing to say" is almost never actually about content. It is not a genuine assessment of the material available for exploration. It is fear, wearing the costume of indifference or practicality, because fear is a far less comfortable thing to admit to than simply not having enough to discuss.

And what exactly is the fear? It takes many forms. There is the fear of what one might discover once the conversation begins in earnest, the fear that the professional across from you will confirm something you have half-suspected about yourself for a long time. There is the fear of becoming vulnerable in front of a stranger, of being seen in a way that the carefully constructed social self ordinarily prevents. There is, perhaps most fundamentally, the fear of relinquishing control of the narrative, of allowing the story you have been telling yourself about your own life to be questioned, rearranged, or quietly dismantled.

All of this is understandable. None of it makes the retreat any less costly.

On entrusting oneself to another

I have been reading Wolfgang Giegerich's essay What Are the Factors That Heal?, and one passage in particular has stayed with me in the days since my friend's call. Giegerich writes about the healing dimension of what he calls releasing oneself, which he understands as entrusting oneself to another person, to the therapist, to what he elsewhere describes as the soul's own self-movement. It is a deceptively simple formulation, and yet it points toward something that most of us find genuinely difficult to do.

How often, in the course of a life, do we truly entrust ourselves to another person? Not merely confide in them, not merely share selected portions of our inner experience while retaining editorial control, but actually release ourselves, suspend the habitual management of how we are perceived, and allow something to unfold that we did not plan in advance? For many people, the honest answer is: rarely, or never, or only under conditions of such extreme necessity that the entrusting itself feels like defeat rather than relief.

And yet Giegerich's point, as I understand it, is that this release is not incidental to healing but constitutive of it. It is not a preliminary condition that must be satisfied before the real work begins; it is part of the work itself. To allow oneself to be held by a process larger than one's own management of it is already a form of transformation, already a departure from the isolated self-sufficiency that so often underlies psychological suffering in the first place.

What you would actually say

So what would you say to a psychotherapist? You would say exactly what you said to me on the phone. You would say what has been following you around for years. You would say the thing you keep returning to, the one that surfaces in quiet moments and in moments of conflict and in the middle of the night. You would say the thing you have been explaining away, contextualizing, attributing to external circumstances, telling yourself will resolve on its own once life becomes a little less demanding.

The question is not whether you have enough to say. The question is whether you are willing to say it to someone whose function is to actually listen, without the competing needs and loyalties that inevitably shape even the most well-intentioned conversation between friends.

The sentence "I have nothing to say" protects something. It is worth asking what.