I recently found myself fantasising about buying a hairbrush that costs more than £100. It is a very beautiful hairbrush: it comes in a choice of seductive colours and it is fashioned from the keratin-rich fibres of south-east Asian boar and from biodegradable cellulose acetate (entirely free of petrochemicals). It was advertised to me on social media and I later sought it out, Googling it again and again, admiring photos of it from different angles and imagining the reassuring weight of its handle in my hand. If ever there were a hairbrush that could help me build a better life, I thought, this surely would be it.
How disturbingly close I came to buying this hairbrush I really cannot say. However, I can tell you when I knew that it was never going to happen. It was just now, when I realised with shock, after months of Googling and ogling, that I don’t use a hairbrush. I haven’t used one in close to 25 years – not since I was old enough to understand that my hair is curly and terrible frizzy things happen when I brush it. I use a wide-toothed comb once a day in the shower.
So, I now find myself wondering, what happened here? What purpose was served by this fantasy of buying an expensive hairbrush that I do not need?
Regular readers will be unsurprised to hear that I think it probably has something to do with avoiding my feelings. For some people (hello, friends), buying things serves to neutralise an unwanted emotion. Another person might punch someone, or watch pornography, or do some work on the weekend, or eat a hamburger, or spend a whole night scrolling on their phone. You do it, then you feel a little bit better – and a little bit ashamed.
What is the emotion I was turning away from? I don’t know. And if I ever find out, it probably won’t be for publication. But perhaps the answer is less important than the question.
Many readers will think I am asking the wrong question and that the answer to the question I should be asking is: that’s capitalism for you! And if ever there were a socioeconomic system that could sell a woman an exorbitantly priced and exquisitely fashioned hairbrush when she had no need for one, capitalism would be it. But I also think that shouting: “That’s capitalism for you!” does not build a better life. It may even take us further away from it.
It is very tempting, when faced with something we don’t understand about ourselves, to turn away from our own minds and towards our society. To shout about capitalism, about the internet, about social media – to find an answer in the outside world. But what has helped me to build a better life is noticing my tendency to do that and then, as a patient in psychoanalysis, to wonder what it is that I don’t want to see in my inside world that makes me turn away from it so quickly.
In other words, I think shouting: “That’s capitalism for you!” would, for me, serve the same function as drooling over an unnecessary hairbrush. It is all serving to close down a feeling. You could call it a kind of self-soothing.
I remember as a fairly new mum, in the depths of sleep-deprived horror, reading and hearing a lot about self-soothing and wondering what people really meant by this. Experts seemed to think the solution to every difficulty was my baby learning to self-soothe. I was not able to think very clearly at that time, because my child was sleeping – or rather, as it felt to me, waking – in 45-minute cycles throughout the night and therefore so was I. We were going through something quite intolerable that nevertheless had to be tolerated. We both had a lot of feelings about this, which it felt as if everyone wanted to soothe away.
Well, I think there is too much soothing going on, self and otherwise. This is why Netflix, social media, parenting experts, south-east Asian boar bristles and capitalism itself can have such power over us – because they feed our compulsion to self-soothe rather than nourishing our need to feel and to try to understand what is going on inside.
Perhaps we don’t realise that there is an alternative to soothing. This alternative is difficult to imagine if you have never experienced it, but it is something my analyst offers me and that I try to offer my patients. It involves developing a capacity to survive not self-soothing. Instead, bear whatever you are experiencing without trying to soothe it away, without trying to brush out the knots – including not knowing what feels wrong. Understand how enraging, frustrating, disappointing and frightening it can be not to know. This can be far more containing than reaching for an immediate answer to a question that actually takes us further away from a truer understanding. (That’s capitalism for you.)
Perhaps our crying babies, and the crying babies inside us, need something different from self-soothing. Perhaps we all need to develop a capacity to bear our distress and to realise that we can survive it and grow through it. This is something that can truly help us to build a better life, and a better society – far more valuable than a beautiful hairbrush that will sit in a drawer, never to be used.
• Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood
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