Returning to Ourselves
Healing isn’t always about what’s new. Sometimes, it’s about what’s repeated. About coming back. To the same room, the same hour, the same chair. Psychoanalysis is built around this repetition because depth doesn’t surface on command. It emerges slowly, when we stop trying to skip ahead.
There is something radical about showing up week after week, not to be given answers, but to listen. To follow thoughts we usually abandon. To sit in silence without needing to fill it. This is what psychoanalysis offers. A space and a structure where we can finally stop performing and begin to hear ourselves.
It’s a kind of healing that doesn’t rush. That doesn’t promise quick results or dramatic breakthroughs. Instead, it creates the conditions for honesty. For noticing the patterns we have rehearsed for so long they have become invisible. And for deciding, with time, which of those patterns we are ready to loosen.
The Inner Unraveling
Joan K. Peters is a professor emeritus of literature and writing, whose academic roots trace back to a Ph.D. in comparative literature from The University of Chicago. Her career has woven through the world of books and the complexities of work, identity, and meaning—resulting in a novel and two non-fiction works on women and work.
Her latest book, Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis, is her most personal yet. It explores the deep, often unseen work of healing through analysis—told not from theory, but lived experience. Joan writes from her home in Ojai, California, where she lives with her husband, her dogs, and her chickens.
Why Depth Takes Time
We live in a culture that rewards resolution. The faster we figure something out, the better. But healing doesn’t happen on a schedule. Especially when it comes to the parts of us we have spent years avoiding. Psychoanalysis invites us to resist the urge to fix and instead, to sit with what is.
Beyond the First Story
In the beginning, we tell the story we always tell. The one we have rehearsed, repeated, and mastered already. It makes sense. It protects us. And it keeps things clean. But with time, the narrative loosens. We say something we didn’t expect. A small detail slips in. A pause lingers. And the work begins not in what we’ve practiced for so long, but in what we have never said out loud.
The Slowness That Reveals
Insight doesn’t always arrive like a breakthrough. Often, it comes in fragments. A sentence you circle back to, a dream that won’t let go, or a word that catches in your throat. It’s subtle but it lands. And once it does, something undeniably shifts.
Trusting the Process, Not the Pace
Psychoanalysis asks us to stay even when it feels like nothing’s happening and especially then. Because the moment we stop chasing insight, it begins to surface. As we finally made enough space for it to find us.
THE RELATIONSHIP THAT HOLDS THE MIRROR
At the core of psychoanalysis lies the relationship between analyst and analysand. It is a structured, boundaried, and clear container. But within that container, something deeply human happens. We bring our patterns into the room. And eventually, we begin to see them.
Projection, Repetition, Reflection
We don’t leave our habits at the door. We bring them in. The way we relate to authority, to intimacy, to silence, to approval. It all shows up. And instead of being corrected, it gets reflected back to us. Not in judgment, but in presence. The repetition becomes visible. And with that visibility comes choice.
When Silence Speaks Louder
The analyst doesn’t rush to fill the space. And that space, though uncomfortable at first, becomes a mirror. We hear ourselves more clearly. We catch our defenses in real time. And we begin to notice how we escape discomfort and what happens when we don’t.
Being Seen Without Performance
One of the most powerful parts of the process is being witnessed without having to be entertaining, articulate, or even coherent. We’re not there to impress. We’re there to reveal. And in that rawness, something begins to soften. Something begins to trust.
What We Avoid Holds the Key
So much of our pain isn’t about what happened but about what we never got to process. The memory we buried. The feeling we disowned. The truth we edited to make ourselves more acceptable. Psychoanalysis invites us to stop editing.
Naming What’s Been Unnamed
There is something powerful in naming. In finding the right word for what we have carried. It doesn’t erase the pain, but it changes our relationship to it. It becomes something we can hold, examine, and integrate instead of something that holds us hostage.
Revisiting Without Reliving
Many of us stay stuck in the past. In psychoanalysis we get to return to what is unresolved with more capacity, more support, and more language. We don’t re-traumatize. We re-contextualize. And in doing so, we recover parts of ourselves that were frozen in time.
Turning Toward, Not Away
Avoidance feels protective. But it also keeps us fragmented. The more we avoid, the more we lose access to joy, to clarity, and to aliveness. Analysis teaches us to turn toward. Slowly. Gently. Until what once felt unbearable becomes something we can sit with and eventually, move through.
The Body Never Lies
The misconception is that psychoanalysis is about the mind, but the body is equally as important. The body keeps track of what the mind has learned to override. Long before we name our feelings, our bodies express them. In a session, this might show up as tension, breath-holding, fidgeting, or even silence. The body speaks in sensation when words aren’t available.
Many of us have learned to mistrust our bodies and to override their signals in favor of logic, performance, or politeness. Psychoanalysis invites us to bring the body back into the room. It teaches us that insight doesn’t land unless it’s felt. That knowing is different when it reaches the nervous system, not just the intellect.
Sometimes, we talk through something over and over but it doesn’t shift until we notice how we clench our jaw when we speak about it. Or how our stomach tightens at a certain name. These physical cues are subtle directions that point us toward what still needs to be witnessed, held, and integrated.
Letting Ourselves Be Known
There’s a loneliness that comes from not knowing ourselves. A distance we feel even in rooms full of people. Because we are only as connected as we are available to ourselves. Psychoanalysis doesn’t just help us process the past. It helps us come home.
We uncover who we have been and we reconnect with who we are becoming. Not as a fixed identity, but as a deeper truth. One that doesn’t need to be constantly managed or explained. One that simply is.
And from that place, relationships shift, boundaries clarify, and our own desires return. The work we do inside that quiet, reflective space begins to echo outwards, softening the edges, clearing the noise, and grounding us in a version of ourselves that’s finally allowed to take up space.
Healing That Doesn’t Ask for a Performance
Most of our lives are shaped by performance of competence, of calm, and of having it together. Even in spaces that claim to be supportive, there is often an unspoken expectation to show progress, to be relatable, or to tell a story that makes sense. But psychoanalysis is one of the rare places where performance isn’t required.
In that space, we don’t need to explain our pain in polished sentences. We don’t need to make it linear or logical. And we don’t need to prove we’re healing fast enough to deserve support. We can speak slowly. Repeat ourselves. Sit in silence. Say things that don’t make sense yet.
This kind of space is rare and that’s why it is so powerful. It reminds us that we are allowed to exist without justification. That insight doesn’t always look like clarity. Sometimes, it looks like confusion that’s finally safe to voice. And in a world that demands resolution, being able to simply be is profoundly healing.
The Quiet Revolution of Staying
There’s something revolutionary about staying. Not just in therapy, but in life. Staying with discomfort. Staying with ourselves. And staying curious, even when it would be easier to distract or disconnect. Psychoanalysis teaches us that not all change looks dramatic. Some of the most important shifts happen in silence.
When we stay, we notice. When we notice, we learn. And when we learn without judgment, transformation becomes possible because we gave it the conditions it needed to emerge. Staying is active. And it is an act of self-respect. Of refusing to abandon ourselves.
Healing doesn’t always come in breakthroughs. Sometimes, it comes in the return. In showing up for ourselves again and again, even when nothing obvious is happening. That’s the power of analysis. It teaches us that real change doesn’t need to perform. It just needs to be trusted long enough to unfold.
The TAKEAWAY
We live in a world that teaches us to move on quickly. To minimize. To cope. But psychoanalysis asks something else. It asks us to stay. To return. To revisit. And in this space, we might come to the realization that we are worth understanding.
There is power in taking ourselves seriously. In honoring the complexity of our inner world. In giving language to the parts that have lived unnamed for too long. Healing isn’t about turning pain into productivity. It’s about making space for what is real and being willing to witness it.
The healing power of psychoanalysis doesn’t lie in how quickly it works. It lies in what becomes possible when we commit to knowing ourselves fully. When we stop managing symptoms and start listening. When we stop fixing and start feeling. That’s where change lives. That’s where we return to wholeness, session by session...
... with deep honesty and self-reflection.
