Most humans want to experience pleasure and avoid pain. And yet I find that many of my clients have trouble allowing themselves to savor positive experiences when they do have them. A common experience is with a client who is doing well and comes in saying, “Things are going well and so I don’t feel have anything to talk about today.” What they are usually implying is that they don’t have anything painful or upsetting to work on. And they often see me as an authority figure, like a parent or teacher who will expect them to work on some problem they have. If I find out they’ve been feeling better lately, I might say something like, “That’s great. How is it for you to be feeling that way and telling me that now? “ Frequently, they express a sense of anxiety or confusion, even guilt, about being with me in this state. After all, they are coming to me to work on difficult issue in their lives. So, if things are going well, they might feel they don’t even have the right to take up my time or they might even think they should now stop therapy..
(This issue about not being able to stay with positive feelings is a very important issue now, during the Covid-19 pandemic because the opportunities for the many pleasures people are used to are now non-existent. But the inability to stay with pleasurable feelings I have found to be true for many clients even before the pandemic hit}
What I usually say at this point is something like, “Maybe what we need to do is to help you enjoy feeling pleasure or joy or happiness. Would you like to do that?” We then go on to explore how they stop themselves from savoring positive experiences. These are often very fruitful and enlightening sessions. Clients are often surprised to realize that what they’ve been coming to therapy for—to experience more positiveness in their lives—they are preventing themselves from realizing! I have found there are many reasons for this.
Causes of People Not Being Able to Savor Positive Experiences
1. They simply weren’t supported in childhood to enjoy themselves because they were told they had to earn a feeling of well-being. Just having that feeling without doing something was not okay. This connects to the following point.
2. They were supposed to be continually active, producing, whatever that meant in their families. The implicit or even explicit message was “You can’t play until you {do your chores} {finish your homework} or something similar. The problem often was they never did finish doing what they were supposed to do. For example, one ex-client’s parents put so much pressure on her to get top grades so she could go to an ivy-league college that she was usually not allowed to play with other kids.. At the age of 10 she was frequently up until 1:00 AM doing homework or writing papers. Children at that age are açtually supposed to get about 10 hours sleep rather than the 6 hours she was getting. And as an adult, she had great difficulty just kicking back and enjoying being in the present even though she had already achieved a great deal, professionally.
3. They never saw the caretakers in their lives savoring their own experiences. For example, just looking at a sunset, reminiscing about the past, watching a movie or sports event on TV and obviously experiencing pleasure. That pattern could even apply to vacations, where there was often much family strife and/or the emphasis on visiting as many tourist sites as possible, not savoring the sites they did visit. It was like marking off a checklist of items on an itinerary.
4. The parents were harried, having to work very hard at what they were doing, without any pleasure in it, or were just unhappy, dissatisfied people. So a child looking like they were enjoying themselves could feel guilt, either from the parent actually expressing resentment that they had to work so hard, while the child was enjoying themselves. Or they showed, in subtle way, that they were jealous of the child’s pleasure. Frequently children in that situation feel they have to take care of the parent by making them happy. Of course, they really can’t do that, but children tend not to have that perspective. And trying mightily to do that, without succeeding, can lead to a sense of shame and failure. And a feeling they don’t deserve to enjoy themselves. I have found clients like that becoming involved with adults, e.g., a spouse, who is unhappy , but feeling they have to make that person happy. It can, of course, work out badly for both persons because the unhappy person is not then motivated to take responsibility for their own happiness; and the one attempting to achieve that never can accompllsh it. One person can’t make another person happy, although they can enhance it.
5. The parent(s) were unable to support the child experiencing pleasure. For example, let’s say the child comes home with a drawing they did in class and is proud of it. The child needs positive mirroring for what they created but, if the parents, for whatever reason, can’t express pleasure in the creation, the child receives some very powerful, negative messages: “My creation isn’t any good.” “I’m not supposed to enjoy what I create,” “What I do and enjoy elicits unhappiness in my parents, so I am not entitled to my enjoyment.” These are, of course, vague, subconscious feelings, which makes them much more powerful and harder to deal with. Even if the child is able to enjoy themself because the process of, for example, drawing, in a solitary way, there’s something missing in not having that supported by caretakers. In adulthood, It’s like not having an internal good parent giving permission to the person to enjoy themself.
6. If the person has enough incentive to experience pleasure, the above dynamics often result in the child doing so in indirect, sneaky ways. And then enjoying themselves always has a driven, subtly fearful quality in adulthood. There is an unconscious sense the more powerful parent is going to come in at any moment and express displeasure at the way in which the person is attempting to enjoy themselves. I have found this is often a partial explanation for people who overeat or are addicted to substances or gambling. I also think it may partially be the cause of the driven attempts in many of our billionaires to acquire as much more money as possible even though they can’t possibly spend it all.
Of course many people during this time of the Covid-19 pandemic are either having to worry about surviving because they have lost their livelihoods, having to work very hard at a dangerous job, or are in the subgroup of people who, because of ill health or age, are worried about contracting the virus. So enjoying their lives may be a luxury they realistically can’t afford.
Now that I have spelled out the syndrome, I will in a future posting, discuss how I work with people who have trouble savoring their positive experiences.