Containers and being contained

Jam jars, tea cups, boxes, lakes, seas, the sky.  Containers: things that contain.  Without the container the contained, the thing inside wouldn’t exist.  A river cannot exist without its’ banks.

Shipping containers are like a large shoe box, often 20ft long 8ft wide and 8 ft high.  They are made from corten steel so that even when they rust they remain waterproof: they can contain the space and protect the contents.

Julie was getting divorced and her house was full of stuff from 40 years of marriage two kids and stuff from her mum's flat.  Her quandary was what to keep and what to get rid of.  She arranged three piles on the floor: keep, charity and rubbish.  The task felt insurmountable, too much to go through and sort out.  She had a brilliant idea, to buy a shipping container so that she could store it all for now and make the detailed decisions about what to keep and what to throw away later. She found a really smart, slightly used shipping container and arranged for it to be transported to her friend’s farm.  He already had a container that he kept some of his stuff in and some of hers; his was functional but scruffy.  She wanted her own container that was clean and that she could put all her stuff in.

She phoned up for our usual therapy session.

I am so ecstatically happy, I’ve bought a shipping container.  You’ve got to help me work out why it makes me so happy.

Well, you have a place to put your things which is clean and smart, that you can feel good about and proud of.  Your friend often wants you to put up with scruffy, dirty situations that make your skin scrawl.  Tidiness, cleanliness and aesthetics, good quality are really important to you.

We unpicked her experience and talked through how she had come round to making the decision her own, even though she had taken advice and then towards the end of the session she said, “It’s a container, I have a container for all my stuff.”   This was a light bulb moment.

In Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore has a birthday and is given a burst balloon by Piglet.  Pooh had told piglet that it was Eeyore’s birthday and Piglet had gone home to fetch a balloon to give to Eeyore and on the way over he had tripped and burst the balloon so that all he ended up giving Eeyore was a bit of rubber. Meanwhile Pooh was fetching a present for Eeyore.  It should have been a pot of honey but Pooh had felt a bit peckish and had eaten the honey on the way over.  When Pooh gave Eeyore the empty jar he said “Here is a useful pot for putting things in”. Eeyore was delighted and told Pooh that his new balloon, the one that Piglet had given him would fit into his pot.  Pooh said a balloon won’t fit in your pot.  Eyeore says “My balloon can.” and he picks the burst ballon up with his teeth and puts it in the pot and takes it out again.

We all need a pot to put things in, a container where we can hold onto good feelings and be nourished by them.  Without a container we can’t hold onto anything and we don’t know who we are.  Where do we put the good feelings, our sense of self, our contact with experience if we don’t have a pot.  To develop a container is to know you exist, that you are living this moment of experience.

Bion wrote about the container and the contained.  The mother/carer in a state of openness takes in and absorbs the undigested experience of the baby/infant.  The infant learns that their experience is containable and that it makes sense or communicates something; it is telling the child about their experience of the world.  The carer digests the experience and hands it back to the infant in manageable bite size chunks: like a bird regurgitating food for their chicks.  Both male and female birds do this.

Containers need to be very strong, not rigid but accommodating.  Undigested experience which can often lead to overwhelm needs to be held by the big strong other. We have to see that the other can hold us: they are not freaked out, they can manage, it’s ok and then bit by bit we learn to contain ourselves.

Building one’s own container is experiencing being held and learning to trust in another’s mind, that they have got it and you can rely on them so that bit by bit you learn to contain parts of yourself.  As adults, feeling contained is learning to trust that we can contain ourselves, that one part of ourselves, the strong competent part can hold the panicky young overwhelmed part, realising the panicky part is not all there is.  It’s realising or being able to see that the panic is a feeling, a wave passing through us rather than a permanent fearful thought.  The frightening thought is this is how it always is, I will be in this forever, things will never change. When we realise it’s a wave, a physiological process moving through us, it becomes workable.

If we do not experience the devoted psychic care of the other where their focus of attention is on our inner experiencing then we learn to focus on their experiencing as a survival strategy: we devote ourselves to trying to understand them, to make sure that they are ok in an attempt to resource them enough so that they will look after us.  In this drama we are not of value and therefore our focus is on the other, we are defined by the other: we are what they think of us or what they show us. With this obsessive focus on the other we abandon ourselves, what we are thinking and feeling, and we develop a false self, a hollow shell, and experience life as empty.  We are not in contact with our moment by moment organismic experiencing, our lifeforce.

Therapy itself is a container: a fixed time (50 mins or an hour) at regular intervals (weekly or more often) where stuff is talked about and experience is shared.  Whatever happens the session always ends roughy the same time.  The client learns to contain their experience knowing there is a space where they can bring stuff, internal and external experience.  Where they learn to bring their attention back to the source, their moment by moment organismic, mind-body experiencing rather than their thoughts about the other.  Therapy is a gradual process of building a container, drip by drip like the forming of stalactites.  Each bit of experience which is made sense of normalised, valued and accepted incrementally builds a sense of self, a container for our experience that we can hold onto.

The session always ends on time.  This is brutal and it is what makes it safe.  There is an end a transition, a limit: like when you are groping in the dark and you find a wall.  The boundary contains you, there is something to push up against, a reference point.  I exist because I can feel the boundary. This is not an easy process and is scary but it is real living and real growth, not just distraction or amelioration.  It is the fierce beauty of meeting one’s edge, feeling one’s living.