Giving Up
What are you willing to give up to get what you desire?
It's not a secret that we hate giving up. Giving up sounds like losing, restriction, sacrifice. It fires up our feeling of FOMO and is directly opposed to our I-want-it-all attitude.
Giving up has been on top of my mind for the last few weeks.
I'm contemplating to actually become a psychoanalyst. Right now I'm in training to become a psychodynamic psychotherapist but I've been eyeing the additional analytic program for sooooo looooong. However, it would mean a huge sacrifice in money and free time. Also potentially delaying a lot of developmental steps (like having kids).
Therefore, I've been asking myself: Is this really what I want?
I've started journaling, reaching out to learn more about the details of the training, compiling spreadsheets about possible patient and time slots to make it all happen... and, yet, there is uncertainty. Because I'd have to give things up. Is this really what I want?
Do we even know what we really desire?
Figuring out what we desire (and we're usually ambivalent about it) is one of the corner stones of psychodynamic practice.
I've chuckled at the idea that I'd have to start the analytic training to figure out in my in-depth analysis whether I want it.
Anyway... And I just stumbled upon another published essay from the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips that got me thinking about all this:
It's beautiful.
“We calculate, in so far as we can, the effect of our sacrifice, the future we want from it (it is never clear, for example, whether a sacrifice is a plea or a coercion or both, a manipulation or a forlorn surrender or both). As though at certain points in our lives we are asking what we have to do to get through to certain people, or to get through to ourselves: to get through to the life we want. We are asking what we are going to have to lose to gain what we think we want.”
📚 What I'm currently reading: I'm re-reading Karen Horney's "Neurosis and Human Growth" for our Patreon book club. If you want to be part of our live discussion, join here: https://patreon.com/psychodynamicpsychology
💬 Quote of the week:
"Because anyone who can satisfy us, anyone who can make us feel better, is going to be the same person who frustrates us and can make us feel worse, we are, in Freud’s account, fundamentally ambivalent animals: where we love we must also hate in frustration, and where we hate we presume we are actively being deprived of love, of what we want and need and could have.” - from Adam Phillips' essay mentioned above.
Best wishes,
Alina