This week I continued revising my second memoir, the story of my year-long termination from Freudian psychoanalysis. I was reading chapter 4 and felt uninspired. It was the second draft of this chapter and not long after I sent it back to the book coach, she responded, “It rambles.” I read it again and reluctantly agreed that it was lackluster. I felt aggravated. I thought it was closer to being finished. This meant that I had to continue working on it. I wanted to move on to Chapter 5!
I was feeling distracted – I did not want to begin the un-rambling – so I opened a book and was captivated by the word gratify. It was a familiar word, but I decided to look it up because I was having trouble defining it clearly. The dictionary said to gratify is to give someone satisfaction or pleasure.
I gritted my teeth and narrowed my eyes as I recalled how my analyst rarely if ever gratified me. Initially, that sounded like a horrible thing to say but when I reconsidered, I realized she had helped me change problematic behaviors and know myself better by not gratifying.
No matter what response I wanted from her, I got nonjudgment. When she didn’t offer any judgments, that left nothing to fight against except me, myself, and I. Over time when I realized she wasn’t going to judge or give her opinion, I realized she was giving me the opportunity to examine my own stuff.
The lesson I learned after many years of feeling frustrated not getting what I wanted was that it is helpful not to cling to or insist on being gratified but instead, step back and examine the reasons behind my expectations. Eventually, I had to remember that while giving and expecting satisfaction and pleasure from relationships is what we commonly expect, in this case, it didn’t make sense. I was paying her to help me mature and if she had only gratified my wishes, I may have felt content with our conversation, but I wouldn’t have learned what my patterns and shortcomings were.
IMAGE: This is one of my favorite Minoan drawings spotted in an Athens museum when we were there in 2009. The Minoan culture was active from 3000 BCE to about 1100 BCE. I was drawn to this ancient culture because many of their drawings contained flowing lines which I think of as depicting the Feminine Principle.
