Bearing It

Bearing It
We are living in a time that asks a lot of people. The news alone is enough to overwhelm most nervous systems on a daily basis. The economy is uncertain. The political ground keeps shifting. The climate is changing in ways we can feel now, not just read about. Many people carry a low-grade dread that has no single source — it comes from everywhere at once, and it doesn't let up.

And then there's the rest of life. The marriage that needs attention. The kid who's struggling. The parent who's declining. The career that doesn't feel like it fits anymore but can't be abandoned yet. The grief that hasn't been fully felt because there hasn't been time. The fury that has nowhere to go.

Most people are managing more than they let on. And most are doing it with whatever tools they picked up along the way — distraction, control, performance, withdrawal, substances, sheer force of will. These aren't failures. They're adaptations. They got you here. But at a certain point, many people find that what got them here isn't enough to get them through what's next.

This is where I think psychoanalytic work has something essential to offer — not as a luxury or an indulgence, but as a practical response to the conditions of being alive right now.

The central task of this kind of therapy, as I understand it, is growing your capacity to bear your own experience. All of it. The grief and the fury. The terror and the insecurity. The tenderness you've been afraid to feel because it might make you vulnerable. The ambition you've been afraid to own because it might make you visible. The sadness about things that can't be changed.

Bearing it doesn't mean enduring it stoically. It means being able to feel what you actually feel without collapsing, without going numb, without needing to immediately convert it into action or explanation. It means developing enough room inside yourself that difficult experience can move through you rather than getting stuck.

And here's what most people don't expect: when you can bear more, you can do more. Not in the productivity sense — in the living sense. Grief that gets felt can become depth. Anger that gets understood can become clarity. Insecurity that gets examined often turns out to be carrying information about what actually matters to you. The raw material of suffering, when it can be held and looked at honestly, has a strange tendency to become something meaningful. Not because suffering is good, but because you are more resourceful than you know, and feelings that seem unbearable in isolation become workable in the presence of someone who isn't afraid of them.

That's what the therapy provides. Not answers. Not comfort, exactly. A relationship in which you can practice bearing what's real — and discover that bearing it changes you. Not into someone tougher. Into someone more flexible, more honest, more capable of meeting the world as it actually is rather than as you wish it were.

Adapting to reality doesn't mean accepting everything passively. It means seeing clearly enough to know what you can change and what you can't, and having enough of yourself available to act on the difference. That's not a small thing. Right now, it might be the most important thing.


About the Author: Andrew Bertell is a licensed clinical social worker with over 15 years of experience in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. He practices in Ashland, Oregon and works with adults and young adults via telehealth throughout Oregon, Maryland, New York, and Idaho.