Satisfied; and the reframing of life
Do you ever listen to a song you used to absolutely love, and suddenly it doesn’t feel as powerful, because, well… life has changed a bit and the meaning you used to attach to that song no longer applies?
I was listening to Hamilton’s “Satisfied” the other day and it didn’t resonate in the same way it used to, which sparked my curiosity. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still one of my favourite songs from a musical, and to this day one of the only songs that has made me cry on the spot the first time I listened to it. To me, “Satisfied” as a song, and the character who sings it, Angelica Schuyler, used to represent that familiar trope of the person who is never satisfied, can never settle, and thus is somewhat punished with an unhappy future, for always wanting more, for never having enough. Not only that, I think there’s always an implicit, unspoken brokenness to such characters, storylines, and even personal narratives. I very much used to subscribe to that narrative about myself. I thought that because I was never satisfied with what I was supposed to have, that there was something wrong with me, that not being satisfied was a character trait and flaw, and those who knew what they wanted or were satisfied with what they had were “good” and “whole”. And better than me. They were also somewhat finished with this so-called “work” of improving themselves. They had found the thing they’d always wanted, or the person they were going to spend the rest of their lives with. I used to fully believe this.
And then, I started working as a therapist. Starting first in a primary school in south London, and then moving to drugs & alcohol services in central London, and then to sexual health, and then to more primary school. I’m now quite settled in private practice and specialising in Psychosexual Therapy, and the past 9 years of seeing and supporting hundreds of people have showed me a very different perspective of life. Through the years, I’ve learned that nuance is probably the kindest thing we can give to ourselves and others. That life is not necessarily an either/or situation, but a both/and situation, or actually, life is an all-of-the-above situation. Very few things, in my experience at least, are either/or. They tend to be exceptions to rules, or universal experiences such as death. Life happens in the complexity of the nuance. We are who we are because of where we’ve been, and because of where we are now. How much we accept or reject our life experiences determines how our futures develop. We are simple and complex in almost equal measure. Our needs to be alive, to belong, to be loved, to be heard, to be seen, to feel that we matter, are the drives of our lives. The complexity comes in how we show these needs.
Working as a therapist, I’ve learned to discern those very simple needs from the very complex presentations, life experiences, and stories that I encounter. And I still miss many things, or get stuck with a client, or feel unsure about to proceed. I used to be part of a spiritual community which placed a huge implicit emphasis on our personal flaws in the form of ego and karma. No matter what happened to us, we had brought that on ourselves. Which depending on who you already are and where you’ve come from in terms of life experiences, could be really empowering or really damaging. Or both. I decided to leave when I noticed the damage it was causing to my sense of self, which was around the time I began working as a therapist. As I began to notice the kindness that people needed to understand their lives with more nuance, I could no longer subscribe to a community and belief system which put so much emphasis on shame and punishment, under the guise of “love and light”.
So much of the confusion, distress, and anxiety I hold in my therapy space is about that very insidious belief so many of us carry: “I’m not enough”, “there’s something wrong with me”, “I should be better”. Which is to say, so much of it is about shame. Shame is the thing that tells us that there is something wrong with us. And so many familial, social, and cultural narratives can feed into this, particularly in the first 20 or something years of our lives. The speediness in which our still-developing brains translate something someone said or something that happens to us into “I’m damaged, there’s something wrong with me” is quite insane.
Glennon Doyle says it best in Love Warrior when she writes: “I’m not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world.” In Untamed, she expands on this even more: “Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.” That idea of “supposed to” is probably one of the other big topics I explore a lot with my clients. They come in all areas of life, for everyone. Working as a therapist has been a very unexpected blessing in my life, in that by helping others to remove shame from their lives and add kindness to their experiences, through the reframing of their life’s narratives, I have continually been doing it for myself as well. I now find it quite exciting when I get to deconstruct and unlearn entire aspects of life, because I have lived with so many limitations from the “I’m supposed to” narrative. And I find it even more exciting when clients find themselves in that space. Albeit painful, there is so much beauty in imagining new futures, rather than following old ones. Again, an important question from Glennon Doyle: “How can we begin to live from our imagination rather than from our indoctrination?”
Something very interesting has been happening in my therapy room in recent months. More and more people are presenting unsatisfied with things that they believed would bring them satisfaction and happiness. The indoctrination in many areas of our lives is becoming more and more apparent. So many people are coming up against this unexpected conflict and tension between what is and what they thought it would be, and experiencing a feeling that they were lied to, even betrayed by the life they were sold. This has been showing up in a few different contexts, but the main one has been relationships. Within my therapeutic bubble, the expansion of consciousness, identity, and lived experiences isn’t just happening on the arenas of gender and sexuality, but also on the relationship one. What other relationship models are there? Is monogamy really the only option? On a much wider scale and context, I see this as one of the signs of a transition between paradigms. Everything feels heavy because everything is transitioning, shifting, and permanently changing. I often pose this question to my clients: “is this you or the culture?” Meaning, is what you’re feeling related to a personal or cultural narrative? Do you really believe what you believe, or are you following what you were told or shown to believe?
So much of what is “wrong” with us has to do with what is wrong with the paradigm of the whole planet. This means that there are many things we cannot control, but there also many others we can. We can investigate and explore our beliefs, do our own personal work; we can make small decisions about our day to day, how much time we spend on different areas of our lives; we can choose to stay in or leave jobs, relationships, homes, cities, countries; we can choose what we eat and drink; we can choose how much we move each day and in what way; we can choose most of the people we spend time with. We can choose between past and future, indoctrination and imagination. We can choose to seclude or expand ourselves. We can choose to do nothing or something.
“I’ll never be satisfied” used to sound and feel negative to me, but not anymore.
References, and other sources to expand your imagination:
· Song:
o “Satisfied”, in Hamilton: An American Musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda
· Podcast episodes:
o Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance, Vox Conversations
o Isabel Wilkerson – This History is Long; This History is Deep, On Being with Krista Tippett
o Esther Perel: The effects of trauma, the role of narratives in shaping our worldview, and why we need to accept uncomfortable emotions, The Peter Attia Drive
o Experts on Expert: Esther Perel, The Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
o Experts on Expert: Elizabeth Gilbert, The Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
o Decolonising Queerness and Making Sex Playful with Gayathiri Kamalakanthan, Doing It! with Hannah Witton
o Moving Beyond the Gender Binary with ALOK, The Laverne Cox Show
o Alok Vaid-Menon: The Urgent Need for Compassion, The Man Enough Podcast
o Tricia Hersey on Rest as Resistance, For the Wild Podcast
· Books:
o Love Warrior, by Glennon Doyle
o Untamed, by Glennon Doyle
o All About Love, by bell hooks
o Rewriting the Rules: Rewriting the Rules: An Anti Self-Help Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships, by Meg-John Barker
o LoveSex: An Integrative Model for Sexual Education, by Cabby Laffy
o Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari
o What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, by Emma Dabiri