Years ago I was sitting in a cafe before work when an exhausted-looking man and his toddler son came in. A “One cappuccino and one babyccino please” later, they sat at the table next to mine. The boy was a bit snotty and whiny, and I could see his dad was working hard to keep him entertained, to give him the time and attention he needed. And then I saw the moment where that time and attention ran out. The man’s focus slipped away, his hand dropping down to his pocket, his tired eyes sliding across to the screen as he eased out his phone …
And then I saw the scream. I saw it before I heard it, because the very loud scream was preceded by a terrifying silent scream (my own child also does a very potent silent scream, so I recognise this retrospectively). The father realised at this point that the game was up, shoved his phone back in his pocket and, defeated, carried his child out of the cafe in one arm, his other hand steering the empty pushchair.
Almost everything worthwhile requires time and attention, and if we want to build a better life, we need to receive more and we need to give more. We obviously need to offer more time and attention to our loved ones – really speaking and listening to each other rather than conducting conversations while looking at a screen. And obviously we need to spend more time on, and pay more attention to, the things we love to do, whether that’s walking in nature or reading or being creative or playing – a game or an instrument. The problem is that we know these things, but we struggle to do them, because we do not seem able to give ourselves – specifically our minds – the time and attention we deserve.
I see it all the time as a psychodynamic psychotherapist: patients who experience my time, attention and respect and realise, for the first time, what they have been denying themselves. Ironically, I frequently encounter the criticism, mostly from people who have not had therapy, that one of its limitations is the time it takes.
Our minds are not microwave meals. When people have been suffering throughout their lives, when they have been carrying around memories in their minds and their bodies of abuse in childhood, or when they have spent decades running away from anxiety or depression that hit in adolescence, or when they have been repeating dysfunctional relationship patterns throughout their adult lives, or if they are stuck, or if they feel weighed down before bed and like crying before they have even opened their eyes in the morning, or if they are struggling with adulthood – every one of them, every one of us, deserves the time and attention it takes to build a better life.
Yes, it can be difficult for many people to find the time, especially those with caring responsibilities and an inadequate support network. Nevertheless, the time this therapy takes is not a limitation; it is one of the most important, truthful and beautiful things about it.
As a patient in psychoanalysis, I have realised the extent to which I have been denying myself this time and attention – and I am not alone. Many of us go out of our way to distract ourselves with things that really don’t matter, spending our money and time on attention-stealing devices that we carry around in our pockets, reading attention-fragmenting social media “feeds” that are anything but nourishing. We attack and undermine our own capacity to pay attention, we waste our own time. I sometimes use an app called SelfControl to block my access to social media so I can concentrate on writing; of course I am exercising no self-control whatsoever – I’m outsourcing it to this app.
I have been thinking about this for some time, most recently as a mother whose eyes sometimes dart to my own mobile phone more often than I wish they would. I think I have understood something about why, like the father in that story, we are sometimes unable to pay consistent sustained attention to our loved ones and ourselves. Are you ready for it?
It’s because it is really hard.
It is difficult and painful to be in true contact with the vulnerable, hungry, in-need parts of our children – and even more so with these parts of ourselves. It is emotionally demanding to try to understand this experience and stay with it, to allow those feelings into our minds, perhaps even to feel overwhelmed by them for a time, to give voice to them and attempt to put them into words as best we can.
Even though I encountered this father and child more than a decade ago, even though I never spoke to them, they have stayed in my mind: a tired, distracted parent, trying his best but always fighting a wish to zone out and turn away from his tearful, needy babe on the brink, who was utterly outraged when he saw his father’s time and attention run out. The memory has popped up from time to time, although I’ve never really asked myself why, until I began writing this column.
But now I see this man and boy in me. Perhaps we all contain within us both the father and the boy in this story, the part that desperately wants time and attention, and the part that can only bear so much, that is desperate to turn away.
I am able to recognise these parts of myself as a patient in psychoanalysis, lying on my analyst’s couch, feeding off the attention and time she gives me, trying to see and bear my own needs, managing it one moment, then turning away the next.
I’m not there yet. I still find myself fobbing off my own vulnerability by burying myself in my phone in the evening, scrolling my feelings away. But at least now I know that’s what I am doing. And this experience has been crucial in helping me to grow my own ability to pay this kind of precious attention to my patients. It is hard work, the development of a discipline and an emotional capacity, and it matters. Because out of time and attention can grow all the other things that make life and mental health better: the capacity to listen, to care, to try to understand.
