ABSTRACT
Over the years, most of us discover that patients pursue psychotherapeutic treatment for a wide variety of reasons. I learned long ago that the desire to simply “solve a problem” or “feel better” is usually only a single constituent within a matrix of motivations that propel individuals to pursue psychotherapy. Here are some of the impetuses that have shown up in my practice over the years:
For the purpose of being recognized
To destroy
To be destroyed
To experience loss
To feel excluded
To encounter, or revisit, sadness
To hide and be found
To hide and not be found so that we can stay hidden
To hide and not be found so that we can experience the power of disappearing and appearing
To make the possibility of failing so present that it will eventually bring itself about—which is a form of success
To have a place to parade our wounds
To gather all of our unspeakable sorrows together and make an offering of them
To forestall death for about an hour
To have our loneliness cured, and then to feel less lonely when we realize that cannot be achieved
To attempt to figure out which feeling is which
To attempt to determine what can and cannot be said to another person
To attempt to determine what can and cannot be said to oneself
To distinguish between the emptiness that fills us up and the emptiness that doesn’t
To know where we have been, and to know that we don’t always know where we have been
To learn to love the face that we want seen, as well as the face that we want to conceal
To understand the vastness of our heart’s vacancy
To be reassured that there is hope
To be reassured that there is absolutely no hope
To feel empowered
To take a step toward feeling empowered by disempowering someone else
To learn to be true to our own intentions … complex, mixed, and maladaptive as those intentions may be
To become someone whose pain remains unattenuated, yet someone whose pain nevertheless amounts to something
To be called to task
To determine what our task is before deciding whether to heed the call
To feel less alone
To cherish loneliness
To share a secret
To keep a secret
To solve a problem
To stave off desperation for an hour
To arrange to have someone else scold, criticize, or punish us so that we can take a break from scolding, criticizing, or punishing ourselves for awhile
To fall back in love with ourselves
To learn or relearn what it means to hate without hating ourselves
To engage our history
To evade our history
To slowly begin lifting the hem of the garment of our identity in order to seduce the therapist, to sense his intrigue and arousal, and then to lower it again
To assume the mantle of good and willing patient so that it can be shed and disposed of
To find someone to dislike more than we dislike ourselves
To seek affirmation that our way of moving through the world is not working well anymore, and that there might be better alternatives
To be cured but to still remain special and distinct
To be reminded that we are, essentially, good
To figure out how to allow what is wrong with us to complete us
To find release from personal captivity
To find the reasons behind captivity that we need to be released from
To stay captive
To enter a sanctuary which will allow us to return home to our essential self
To come to terms with the elements of the self that, no matter how disavowed or detested, still comprise the Self
To be allowed to ask the question: “How did I find myself here?”
To be reminded of and have acknowledged the immense strain that we are bearing and struggling to carry forth
To be allowed to let our wounds heal
To be allowed to let our wounds speak
To be allowed to listen to our wounds
To thwart the person who insisted on our treatment (parent, spouse, judge, etc.)
To find a way to recognize fear and pain but prevent them from cancelling out our right to be beloved
To have a cheerleader while fighting the fight, whatever the fight is
To feel cherished
To experience
To be challenged to discover our strengths
To be patiently held until our discovered strengths have the opportunity to emerge
To escape, even for an hour, an inner or outer world that feels intolerable
To camouflage our desire and capacity to annihilate
To try to find a name for the nameless longing—and to accept the inevitability of namelessness despite the desire to name
To learn how to harness desires using the power of insight and intellect
To live our life, rather than to just comment on it
To provide a commentary on life, rather than to just live it
To have our thinking validated
To have our thinking contaminated
To learn, and/or to have translated, the native language of the self
To figure out how to go on when life seems irreparably broken
To be reparented
To understand how our parents went awry
To understand our parents
To experience the thrill of having someone only see the imagined version of ourselves
To test out the possibility that being understood makes everything feel possible
To find something transcendent or incandescent in the banal and quotidian rhythms of everyday life
To discover what we are and are not capable of
To figure out what to do when words are no longer able to express what we are feeling
To seek justice
