A handy sea-faring metaphor: learn to sail, for we cannot tame the ocean

I am the person people come to when they would like to further understand their own mind; their feelings, their reactions, the content of their thoughts, how to make it easier, but mostly to answer the question: "Why the fuck is this so difficult!?"

And in the end, the fundamental answer is a longer, heavily customised, and often verbose, version of: "Because it is." That may sound callous, but it is the plateau to aim for, it can take years, and really it embodies the most important part to personal growth: acceptance of our minds.

My job is to play the game from the outside: I analyse, I mull, I perceive and I communicate clearly based on research and my own journey. And it bares good results, I feel it is a success. I can label and create a decently signposted map of the mind from the combined perspectives of Jungian psychoanalysis, psychodynamic counselling, cognitive behavioural therapy; evolutionary, developmental and social psychology, with smatterings of philosophy and tackling the existential questions of purpose, free will, morality and freedom.

But my purpose here is not to brag, far from it.

My point is, is that it is hard.

Despite all this, I spend many days of the week, most of the hours of that day, in some heightened state of anxiety and fervency. It is my driving force and I channel it into good things. But sometimes it can turn on me negatively. My OCD mind can race with scenarios from the guilt of buying lunch to preposterous intrusive scenarios where the worst thing feels the most inevitable, and just gains a sense of greater likelihood and starker and more heart-wrenching images the more I fight it like 4d finger trap. Whipping from the minds of my clients, my pupils and my loved ones, to checking in that I am choosing the right actions, saying the right things and working to find those individual times where less than perfect communication is going to be the crashing downfall of my most important relationships.

I catastrophise, I project, my past trauma's trigger me; I doubt myself and the intentions of others and resort to defence mechanisms of condemnation (sometimes me, sometimes them), avoidance, distraction and over-compensation. Sometimes it takes a gargantuan effort to stay afloat and reasonable. Sometimes I just have to hide as the effort may be too much.

The only difference between the struggles of me, a therapist, and those who come to me for help, is that I know how to navigate it and how to stay afloat.

Trying to tame the mind, to hammer out still waters of calm reefs with our measly oars, in hope we can forever dally amongst the shallows is a wonderful idea. To have peace! To find that little niche of space and time where it is harmonious and you know exactly who to trust, what to do to survive, have a purpose and enough fun and community to be content. Where the mind is quiet and everything is just fine.

But in the end, our unconscious is the ocean upon which our ego, our identity (not the misappropriation that ego is self-serving behaviours or thinking), is a ship. Now sometimes an unconscious can be calm, peaceful and warm, with abundance and wonder swimming around ubiquitous, and sometimes it is wild, stormy and unpredictable; threatening to throw us overboard into a world of panic from which we feel there is no return. The inexperienced crash, get waterlogged, lose huge amounts of energy and resources just trying to flail about and limit the damage, some get swept away entirely. But as time goes on, if we persevere, and stay at its mercy, but grow to know it as something separate from ourselves despite being intricately linked, our sea legs harden. Eventually, after however much time it takes - longer rather than quicker for certain - our sense of the mists, waves and winds become automatic, and though the same torrents take us, we know how to sail through them: with gritted teeth, growls, grumbles and occasional begrudged laughter, and once we are there it is as though we were never meant to be anywhere else. We get that perverse joy of being able to sail on the choppiest and most unforgiving waters, and it makes us feel alive. Those calm waters we know would get boring, there would be no growth, no feeling of having conquered something, no real sense of ultimate power of saying buoyant and steady amid our fears.

The only way to sail through a storm, is to face it head on enough times that you come to understand it intrinsically. We can only avoid them for so long, so we best learn the hard way as there is no other way.

Master the ship, the ego, learn how to navigate. Don't try and master the ocean for it runs too deep.

It takes time.

Doesn't make it easy though...

But few things worth knowing are easily acquired.