Knowing our own minds is difficult at the best of times. It is extraordinarily hard
to secure even basic insights into our characters and motivations – of a kind that we hope
can free us from some of the neuroses and compulsions that spoil so much of our lives.
It is therefore especially humbling and at moments truly dispiriting to realise that
dispelling ignorance of our psyches with knowledge isn’t going to be enough by itself. Or rather,
we stand to realise that there is going to need to be a further and yet more arduous
distinction to observe between knowing something about ourselves intellectually and knowing
about it emotionally. We might, for example, come to an intellectual understanding that
we are timid around figures of authority because our father was a remote and distant figure
who didn’t give us some of the support and love we needed to tolerate ourselves. Assembling
this insight into our characters might be the work of many years and, having reached
it, we could reasonably expect that our problems with timidity and authority would then abate.
But the mind’s knots are sadly not so simple to unpick. An intellectual understanding of
the past, though not wrong, won’t by itself be effective in the sense of being able to
release us from the true intensity of our neurotic symptoms. For this, we have to edge
our way towards a far more close-up, detailed, visceral appreciation of where we have come
from and what we have suffered. We need to strive for what we can call an emotional understanding
of the past – as opposed to a top-down, abbreviated intellectual one. We will have
to re-experience at a novelistic level of detail a whole set of scenes from our early
life in which our problems around fathers and authority were formed. We will need to
let our imaginations wonder back to certain moments that have been too unbearable to keep
alive in a three-dimensional form in our active memories (the mind liking, unless actively
prompted, to reduce most of what we’ve been through to headings rather than the full story,
a document which it shelves in remote locations of the inner library). We need not only to
know that we had a difficult relationship with our father, we need to relive the sorrow
as if it were happening to us today. We need to be back in his book lined study when we
would have been not more than six; we need to remember the light coming in from the garden,
the corduroy trousers we were wearing, the sound of our father’s voice as it reached
its pitch of heightened anxiety, the rage he flew into because we had not met his expectations,
the tears that ran down our cheeks, the shouting that followed us as we ran out into the corridor,
the feeling that we wanted to die and that everything good was destroyed. We need the
novel, not the essay. Psychotherapy has long recognised this distinction. It knows that
thinking is hugely important – but on its own, within the therapeutic process itself,
it is not the key to fixing our psychological problems. It insists on a crucial difference
between broadly recognising that we were shy as a child and re-experiencing, in its full
intensity, what it was like to feel cowed, ignored and in constant danger of being rebuffed
or mocked; the difference between knowing, in an abstract way, that our mother wasn’t
much focused on us when we were little and reconnecting with the desolate feelings we
had when we tried to share certain of our needs with her. Therapy builds on the idea
of a return to live feelings. It’s only when we’re properly in touch with feelings
that we can correct them with the help of our more mature faculties – and thereby
address the real troubles of our adult lives. Oddly (and interestingly) this means intellectual
people can have a particularly tricky time in therapy. They get interested in the ideas.
But they don’t so easily recreate and exhibit the pains and distresses of their earlier,
less sophisticated selves, though it’s actually these parts of who we all are that need to
be encountered, listened to and – perhaps for the first time – comforted and reassured.
We need, to get fully better, to go back in time, perhaps every week or so for a few years,
and deeply relive what it was like to be us at five and nine and fifteen – and allow
ourselves to weep and be terrified and furious in accordance with the reality of the situation.
And it is on the basis of this kind of hard-won emotional knowledge, not its more painless
intellectual kind, that we may one day, with a fair wind, discover a measure of relief
from some of the troubles within us. Our dictionary features the language of emotional intelligence.
Too often, we struggle to find the right words to explain what we mean; this dictionary is
a tool to help us convey our true emotions and intentions with economy and precision.