We all want to cut out the bad parts of ourselves. It won’t work, and it won’t make us happier | Life and style

Uwhen i was a little girl i cried a lot. I used to desperately wish I wasn’t so tearful. I remember the shame so well. I sit on my bed on a Sunday night, hot-cheeked and mad with tears, holding on to the thought that when I grow up, I’ll never cry. I would be a strong, confident and capable woman and never again would I feel like a whiny little girl who didn’t want to go to school tomorrow and just wanted to stay with her mom. I hated that part of me and was desperate to get rid of it. This is what a better life meant to me back then.

Since becoming a therapist, I’ve seen this kind of desire manifest itself in patient after patient—and I’ve continued to see it in myself as a therapy patient. It seems to be a pretty ubiquitous desire, even though we’re not always aware of it: this desire and even belief that if we just try hard enough, if we can find that magic self-help book or therapist or personal trainer or Instagram filter, we we will really be able to get rid of the parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of, hate, or don’t want to admit.

If you don’t recognize this in yourself, you might wonder what really annoys you about your friends, family, and colleagues: what really gets under your skin about the way they are and the things they do? It probably annoys you so much because it unconsciously reminds you of yourself.

It can be a vulnerability that one thinks of as a weakness that needs to be outgrown, like me and my cry. This may be a traumatic experience or experiences, such as a car accident or abuse, that they wish had never happened and they unconsciously believe that they can do something wrong so that they can go back to the person they were. Or it could be a feeling of neediness that they want to deny completely, perhaps by becoming completely independent or by making sure that they are always the one who takes care of everyone else in their lives, never letting anyone else take care of them. them.

The patient may bring any one of these – but often it’s all three, and there is an expectation that I, as their therapist, will somehow help them cut out those bad parts and banish them for good. This desire is often outside their conscious awareness and will not be shared with me directly, but will be communicated through, say, a dream in which it may appear, for example, as a surgeon with a scalpel.

It is a powerful fantasy that we can erase all of our vulnerability, trauma, neediness, and dependency, that we will then be perfectly healed, stronger than before. It is also very dangerous. If we take the fantasy at face value, in all its concreteness, and follow it through, we end up with lobotomies. In the first half of the 20th century, many neurologists believed that surgically removing part of the brain or using a sharp instrument to sever the connections within it could cure their patients.

What I have learned from my patients and from my own therapy is that this cruel rejection of vulnerability is the opposite of strength. This is the opposite of repair and growth and leaves us impoverished, neglected. My patients have shown me again and again that the better life is not one in which one feels that one has successfully managed one’s sensitivity, that one is completely self-sufficient, and that one has never had difficult or painful experiences.

If the therapy has been meaningful, if it has been helpful, the patient leaves more deeply connected to these parts of himself. They have begun to mourn the terrible losses they tried to avoid in order to understand why they were the way they were and why they did the things they did. They feel able to carry their painful experiences and feelings both more lightly and more firmly, as a more integrated person who can feel genuine care – at least at times – for the parts of themselves that they previously wanted to get rid of . Better mental health means restoring inner connections, not severing them.

This is what it means to grow up, says Jana Williams, a psychoanalyst for children, adolescents and adults. “We are like trees,” she once told me. In a cross-section of the trunk, she explained, you can find all the rings that mark the history of this tree, from the smallest ring from its earliest days in its core to the largest, most recent ring under the bark. We all still have a baby part, a child part, a teenage part – we can’t get rid of them. When we try, I believe it leaves us as empty as a hollowed-out tree trunk. During therapy, she said, “I think we always find the baby, the toddler, the adolescent in the patient. Like the circles in a tree, they are all there.

It’s been over 30 years since I sat on my bed and wished my tears away. But my memory came back recently. It was the Sunday night before my daughter’s first day of kindergarten. I felt so raw and vulnerable, quite desperate and holding back tears. And the thought occurred to me: where is my mother to take us both to the nursery tomorrow? This little girl is not going anywhere, as much as I wish she would at times.