Some of us belong to a social group politely known as ‘worriers.’ That is, we are close to panic on a range of issues pretty much all the time. We worry that the scratch on our knee will turn cancerous, that we’ll catch a deadly disease from touching the hotel door, that all our savings might disappear in a random economic disaster, and that our enemies could spread rumours that will forever disgrace and demean us.

So overwhelming and debilitating can these fears become, we may be advised by well-meaning friends that we should probably go and visit a psychotherapist in haste in order to calm ourselves. 

Here, we’re likely to learn a lot of very reassuring things, in particular, that none of our powerful fears is really any kind of reflection on what’s likely to happen in the real world. The scratch on the knee is just a scratch, there isn’t about to be some global catastrophe, there isn’t some disease that’s going to wipe us all out, the hotel door is blameless, we’re not going to be financially ruined, no one is properly interested in humiliating us, and so on and so forth.

We learn to make a distinction between our inner world and the outer world, the first filled with terror and apprehension, the second emerging as a far more benign, indifferent and easy-going place. We also learn, if we read a little psychotherapeutic theory, why there should in some of us be such a dislocation between the inner and outer worlds. It comes down to a theory about childhood: some of us had childhoods that were so disturbed and cruel, so filled with shame and loneliness, that they have coloured our view of the whole of life; we assume that things will always be as bad as they once were. 

The task of psychotherapy is then to start to show us how powerfully and negatively biased our perceptions are and that the adult realm actually contains far fewer demons than we thought, and far more opportunity, solace and forgiveness. We learn that the catastrophe we feared would happen has in fact safely already happened. We get a lot better.

But then, if we’re unlucky, at key moments in our lives, we may run into a range of harrowing events that threaten to upend everything we’ve carefully learnt to believe in and that make a mockery of the soothing voices we’ve come to trust. Suddenly, in spite of our best efforts to be resilient and sane, we learn that we are in fact facing a mortal illness. Or, after slowly overcoming a compulsive handwashing fetish, we’re told that a germ truly might kill us after all. Or, despite our attempts to explore our sexuality with courage, we learn that some enemies really do want to humiliate us for the pleasures we’ve pursued.

In confusion and bitterness, we may turn against therapy and its naive view of reality and cry bitterly: ‘See! It really is as bad as I always thought it was…I suspected that life was hell and it really is.’ Or, as one comic is reputed to have had inscribed on their gravestone, ‘I told you this wasn’t just a cough.’

This may sound like the moment when all attempts at psychotherapeutic calm or at emotional maturity and wisdom more broadly should fairly come to an end. But once we’ve endured the initial panic, we can actually insist that this need be nothing of the sort. We can strive for wisdom despite, or even in the midst of, a range of the most awful external eventualities.

We should be clear on what’s at stake: psychotherapy does not promise us that nothing will ever go wrong in our lives again. It can’t remove intractable evils. What it can do, however, is to teach us a variety of mental manoeuvres that will render those evils – death among them – a great deal less painful and persecutory than they would otherwise have been. There are better and worse ways to endure the afflictions we cannot avoid. There are ways of interpreting disasters that add a whole new layer of pain and fear to them – and others that, while they don’t magic away the chaos, at least remove its secondary, aggravating characteristics.

1.demean v. 降低…的身份; 贬低

2.debilitate vt. 使衰弱；使虚弱

3.apprehension n. 理解；恐惧；逮捕；忧惧

4.eventuality n. 可能性；可能发生的事