Unlearning

I’ve been in therapy for five or so months now, I think. A lot, of course, to think about: some of which I’ll post here.

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1. Therapy as unlearning:

Learning delegates the exercise of an action from the conscious to the unconscious. One learns to drive: how clumsy and unco-ordinated you were! How hard to assemble the actions of foot across pedals and hands across wheel and gearstick. How much concentration it takes to co-ordinate those movements, and then to make them, constantly, in response to the view from the windscreen and mirrors. Thinking is resource-intensive. With time, with learning, it becomes an articulated process. It becomes autonomic.

When you walk, do you step forward with your left foot or your right foot first?

I thought about this for a while once, then almost fell over.

Under the force of trauma - which might be a spectacular, discrete event, or a process: something may break under the force of a blow, say, or as a consequence of erosion - you learn new ways of working with and through the difficulties, new tactics, new strategies. All of them are useful, for a while; they all work, up to a poit. Beyond that point they become dysfunctional. Maladaptive adaptations. You do them before you realise you are doing them. They’re autonomic.

Therapy, it seems to me, helps to disarticulate such movements, to break it down, expose the parts.

It teaches you to unlearn.