Are you a pleasure for people? It's time to discover what you really want | Mental health

MEach of us tends to decrease ourselves and others with a severe and reductive sentence rather than digging more deeply in search of understanding. Enter the idea of ​​”people's pleasure”. The term has a ring; It rolls from the tongue and its meaning seems obvious. He feels comfortable and annoyne. We know where we are with pleasure.

But are we really? I hadn't taken the time to think about it until recently. And the more I did, the more I found the sentence, and the more the possible unconscious dynamics reduced it, discouraging and disturbing. It took me several years of psychoanalysis so that I could see more clearly what my tendency for people was hiding, and what I saw did not plead me at all. What I saw was not annoyne. I saw that at the heart of myself, where something real and solid should be, seated a mirror, reflecting everything I thought that others wanted to see.

It was a shock to realize that I did not know at all that I was. The fact that the ego I built was not really constructed from my own character, qualities and desires, but from my interpretation of what others wanted me. It was a terrible and terrifying achievement – but perhaps the most important of my therapy time so far. Because before being able to start building a better life, you must ask yourself, do you even know who decides what the best means?

When people talk about people who like it, they often seem to refer to women. I am sure, as it has often been written, that there is something in the way girls and women are socialized that feed and reward this mirror construction, that I see each time I see a girl wet for a selfie.

But I also think that this way of relating to ourselves and others can affect anyone. Perhaps, as Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott has theorized, he is rooted in early childhood, linked to the development of what he called the false self. He thought that the false self could emerge when a baby intuitively feels that their caregiver does not have the capacity to manage their real feelings, whether hunger, need, rage, pain or anything else. The false self can then take over and fill the space where any real sense of self could grow, because the infant tries to be the baby, then the child, then the adolescent, then the adult who is sought, rather than the one they really are. To comply, rather than being.

I used to think that pleasant people as an active and aware choice. I may knowingly pretend to a friend that it didn't bother me to travel to meet them, while recognizing in private that I had hidden my real feelings of being too tired for Shlep. But Winnicott did not speak of this more ordinary type of claim; Its description takes us in an entirely different field, an unconscious reshaping of our desires and our needs which depends completely on the expectations or wishes of others, leaving a feeling of emptiness inside where something real could be. For a while, I assumed that there was nothing at the heart of me; That this mirror construction was all I was. It was a very disturbing and disturbing period of my therapy.

But I realize now that this was not the case. There were many; I just didn't want to know. Very unpleasant feelings are hidden under the reflective surface: envy, hatred, anger, fear, vulnerability, a kind of swollen arrogance as shield for need, shame and fragility. And, of course, there is much more than I am inclined to share publicly. No wonder I was so anxious at the time; These are some of my monsters hidden under the bed. I used to consider these parts of myself as faults that had to be deleted. I'm a little nicer now. I realized that I am as human as the next person.

Since this achievement, I have also started to see other characteristics and qualities. They include a kind of bigoudonne and a courage that I did not know very well. Resilience and solidity that are next to my fragility; In fact, it comes out. All of this was hidden from me too. Since I knew these different parts of myself, my life has certainly improved. I feel less empty and more solid now, most of the time. Something has grown inside: something real, a feeling of oneself, an ability to be in contact with my emotional life and listening to me in a real way – and to recognize when I cannot – it brings with him a feeling of agency. The monsters under the bed, and behind the mirror, are much less anxious now than I finally presented myself.

Moya Sarner is NHS psychotherapist and author of When I grow up – conversations with adults looking for adulthood