One common kind of mental illness (which doesn’t present itself as an illness to us of course,
it’s far too clever for that) leads us to worry incessantly about the future: to worry
about bankruptcy, disgrace, physical collapse, abandonment.
What is pernicious about this kind of worrying is that it picks up on genuine features of
the here and now; it presents itself as reasonable but, on closer examination, it clearly isn’t.
There are always a few alarming things going on: there is some turbulence in the economy,
there can be things that go wrong with bodies, reputations do rise and fall… But what should
eventually alert us to the peculiarity of our position is the duration, scale and repetitiveness
of our worries: we should learn to see that we are essentially worried all the time about
something.
The target may shift, but what is constant is our insecurity about existence.
It is in such situations that a therapist may make a hugely useful intervention: they
may point out that the way we worry about the future is in fact telling us a huge amount
about our past.
More specifically, we are worried right now in a way that mirrors the panic we once felt
as children; we are greeting the challenges of the adult world with the defenceless panic
of the child we once were. What we are doing in the process is exchanging the pain of remembering
the difficult past for a sense of foreboding around the future; the catastrophe we fear
is going to happen has already happened.
So sealed off are our memories, we project them forward, where they greet us as apprehensions
of what is to come - rather than identifying themselves as legacies of unmasterable past
anxiety.
The good therapist becomes aware of the correct source of the anxiety - and doesn’t let
go of their insight. They will listen politely and generously to our description of our current
panic - what will happen in our job? Have we studied enough? What if our enemies gang
up on us?
But then they will gently try to shift the conversation to the past, to show us that
the future looks so fearful because we are being counterproductively loyal to the terrors
of an earlier age, which we now need to remember, to feel sad about and then eventually to mourn
and move on from.
We should be disloyal to those who brought us up in an atmosphere of fear in order to
save what remains of life from always appearing doom-laden: we may be trying to stay close
to them by continuing to panic alongside them, but we owe it to ourselves to break the circle
of worry and to make our future different from the past, by remembering, localising
and mourning what belonged to yesterday even as it pretends to be about tomorrow.