Eva’s Self-Reflection Journal

14 January 2019

Welcome to the self-reflective, analytical, navel-gazing new me!

Janet, our psychotherapy lecturer, told us we have to record our thoughts and our patient sessions to "facilitate learning by exploring our inner feelings."

She assured us yesterday that it's for our own personal development, not for anyone else to read or assess.

Okay, so here are some deeper feelings. Confession number one. I'm the shitty one here. The faker. I'll never be like them.

This morning we sat in a circle in an airless basement of the clinic, taking it in turns to think about what attracted us to train. People talk about their natural empathy, their listening skills, how they want to help others to avoid the same terrible mistakes they've made. On and on they go. Caught up in their own worthiness, their own smug sense of how bloody good and helpful and caring they are, how they want to use their own suffering to help others.

When Janet turned to me, I froze. Watching their eyes slip-slide over me, I was convinced they could spot an imposter in their midst. What was my reason for being here? I told them about my diagnosis of congenital analgesia, how my mutation prevents me from feeling pain or anxiety. Maybe this was why I sometimes felt closed off, empty, as if nothing really mattered.

Someone asked if the two were really connected, the physical and emotional. Janet suggested that maybe it was down to language; how experiencing pain allows us to express and inhabit emotional pain too. In this way, our bodies and minds are intricately linked. She talked about Finnish researchers who have mapped the body for different types of emotions, locating grief and heartbreak in the chest, anxiety and fear in the stomach, anger in the arms and, in contrast, love as an all-over body sensation. They were fascinated by all of this, but somehow none of it chimed for me. Fear, anxiety, anger, depression: my body lacks an atlas for it all. I'm Teflon-coated. How can you be truly brokenhearted, for instance, without feeling the physical ache inside?

Of course, I'm curious about the extremity of other people's emotions. I've always wondered if I lack what it takes to be a real artist. Would Frida Kahlo's boundless creativity have existed without her chronic pain? One was almost certainly a condition of the other. To make real art is to know how suffering truly feels. Where better than a therapist's office? I see and hear it all around me. On the faces of the other trainees when they talk about their messy lives, painful divorces, neglectful parents, addictions, recovery. It's emotional torment that I cannot comprehend, food that I will never taste. But perhaps being up close to all this will help to unlock me, to find out how it really feels to hurt.