The other night, I got home from work feeling very tired. It was really cold and what I really wanted for dinner was a jacket potato. In fact, I wanted two. So I heated the oven, slathered my potatoes in oil and sea salt and cooked them for an hour and 20 minutes.
I was so tired that I neglected to complete the final step, an error that risked turning this very ordinary dinner into an explosive disaster: I forgot to prick my potatoes.
Guess what happened. Absolutely nothing! They were crispy on the outside, soft on the inside and delicious all the way round. Was it my imagination, or were they more moist than usual? Perhaps more moisture was retained because of the absence of pricks? I didn’t even need to add butter!
What have I been doing all these years? Just as big pharma, big tobacco and big tech have been taking advantage of our deepest anxieties, I theorised, big fork has been playing on our unconscious terror of exploding spuds.
It got me thinking about all the rules we follow without thinking, those we don’t even realise we follow because we have always followed them and we don’t even know it is possible not to follow them.
I think this realisation is a fundamental step in building a better life. Because before you can start building, you have to be able to see what is right in front of you – and that can be harder than it sounds.
One of my favourite lines in psychoanalysis comes from a paper by Thomas Ogden. He writes about what gets stirred up when a patient enters this kind of therapeutic setting for the first time. Psychoanalysts are often mocked as silent and pompous – but the point is that something crucial can emerge for the patient in the space left by no small talk, as Ogden observes: “The consulting room is a profoundly quiet place as he realises that he must find a voice with which to tell his story. This voice is the sound of his thoughts, which he may never have heard before.”
It is very difficult to truly listen to a sound that you have always heard. It is very difficult to know something is missing if you have never had it, or to see that something doesn’t have to be that way if it has always been. That is what good therapy should offer you: an opportunity to hear the sound of your thoughts for the first time. This can change your capacity to listen to yourself outside the sessions as well.
It can be a bit of a shock. You may suddenly realise you have been speaking to yourself in a cruel way that sounds a lot like your first teacher – and that you speak to others like that, too. You may be surprised to see that the rules and routines you have built into your day get in the way, rather than help you. You may find you have wasted years of your life pricking your jacket potatoes out of fear – drying them out, fending off your terror of an explosion that may never come.
Now, I am not suggesting we stop pricking our potatoes altogether. Big fork may well have a point. I am no scientist, but I have done some Googling and there is an awful lot of advice suggesting that not pricking your potatoes is a risky and potentially messy business. This really doesn’t seem a risk worth taking, as baked potatoes take so long to cook anyway. (Yes, I know you can use a microwave, but then it wouldn’t be a baked potato, would it? It would be a microwaved potato and it would taste like one.)
But it is worth asking yourself about rules you follow because you have always followed them, ones that might be drying out your life, sapping it of freshness and flavour. It is a Jewish tradition to eat honey cake to welcome in a sweet new year – one of my favourite traditions, in fact, although it wasn’t always. My mum used to bake her delicious honey cake, then wrap it in foil, put it in a tin and store it in the cupboard for months. (At least, that is how I remember it – she assures me it was less than a week.) Can you imagine? Shut away, that honey cake went from moist and delicious to dry and tasteless. Now you know the childhood trauma that keeps me in psychoanalysis four times a week.
I was in my early teens when I asked why she did this. She said her mother had always done it, it was what the recipe book instructed and she had never questioned it – it was just what she did. From that point on, we ate fresh honey cake – and I can tell you there is nothing sweeter.
I don’t mean to do myself and my colleagues out of work, but I don’t think you always need to have therapy to hear yourself in a new way (although good therapy can help to make the experience life-changing). Good and honest friends can offer you this; a caring manager at work might make a helpful observation; a mouthy daughter could provide incisive culinary critique; a loving partner could come to know you better and more deeply than any friend or colleague. If we allow it, all these relationships can help us to hear something in ourselves that we have not heard. They can help transform a song from the overplayed and lifeless soundtrack of your life into a fresh and intriguing melody, as if you are hearing it for the first time.
Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood
