Every therapist who adopts a psychoanalytic perspective has long recognised that, to be effective, therapy requires that a patient not only talks about his memories, his ideas and dreams, his hopes and desires, but also expresses his feelings. [Bowlby 1988]

The capacity to express feelings spontaneously is essential for mental health, and to develop this capacity, and to benefit from therapy, we need to learn to 'let go' in the sessions; to relinquish conscious control of what we say and allow thoughts and feelings to emerge freely from inside us. Learning to let go is therapeutic in itself because it is part of the process of learning to be ourselves in the company of others.

The therapist can only encourage us to let go. He cannot make us do it, and nor can we make ourselves do it. Like much of what takes place in therapy we must 'allow it to happen', and a good therapeutic setting is designed to help us to do this.

Resistance to letting go

When we start to let go we begin to sense that we may be keeping large areas of our mind under lock and key. But going deeper is never easy. We overcome resistance at one level only to meet it again at a deeper level, or in a different area.

Some manifestations of resistance to letting go:

Silence. Resistance to letting go can show itself in many ways. Perhaps the simplest is to find that our minds are blank and we have nothing to say. Quite long periods of silence can ensure, sometimes taking up most of a session, or even carrying across several sessions.

Self-censorship. Another kind of resistance is when we discard some of our spontaneous thoughts with counter-thoughts such as, 'That is too trivial to be worth saying,' or, 'I couldn't possibly say that!'

Clinging to reason. Another manifestation of resistance can be to persist in engaging the therapist in intellectual discussion.

Evasion. There can also be a kind of pseudo-letting go, when we launch into a stream of thoughts and feelings which seems genuinely important but is really, if we are honest with ourselves, a way of diverting attention away from the real issues.

Overcoming resistance to letting go

The emergence of these manifestations of resistance and working through them is the stuff of therapy, but it is not that once we become aware of them we can simply stop doing them. Ultimately what enables us to overcome resistance and meet the fearful experience of letting go is our trust of the therapist.

Letting go and childhood

Problems in letting go derive from childhood. In a normal infancy a baby knows automatically how to 'let go'. Its feelings arise spontaneously and are expressed without inhibition, but as often as not its parents interfere with its natural ability to express feeling.

If the idea of 'letting go' and 'allowing it to happen' sound similar to bodily process this comparison is quite apt. Our bodily life is largely outside our conscious control. We don't really 'know' how to walk, talk, fall asleep, wake up, and so on, we just know that we can allow these things to happen.

As we develop our capacity to let go we will start the process of, in Freud's words 'making the unconscious conscious' and discover aspects of ourselves of which we were previously unaware.

The actual experience of letting go can be something pleasant, something mildly uncomfortable, or something quite shocking. We may get a sense of something else taking over, something other than our everyday selves, and of moving into a different time scale. After it has happened we can feel that we have travelled a long way, or entered a different reality, and in this respect it can be like a child's experience of play.