Central European Time

Malka Ceh, PhD, MSc, cNPA

Tag: Psychoanalysis

The Rebellion Against a Life Lived Unnoticed

I have never been an Osho fan because I routinely harbored a deep distrust of popular culture, and at one point, everywhere I looked, there were Osho books. So, it made me indifferent to even checking who or what Osho stands for. (This is not what makes me a rebel.) Anyway, the mighty algorithm gave me a second chance. It recently pushed a few clips of the man onto my feed, and I have no choice but to admit I often do find myself on the same page with what he’s saying. I still haven’t bitten into any of his many books (btw, isn’t the discrepancy between the speed of his speech and the obvious speed of his writing remarkable), but my curiosity is piqued, and I am following his legacy’s channels. As such, I was offered an Osho Times piece on the difference between revolution and rebellion, and I actually clicked with the distinction.

Osho argues that what we usually call rebellion has, throughout history, been revolution. However, revolution is a collective phenomenon. It’s people organizing against an existing order, overthrowing it, but then just replacing it with another. So, what revolution brings is a change in the people in power. The structure of the struggle, however, survives; what turns is only the wheel. Those who were outside move inside, a new opposition forms, and eventually somebody starts talking about another revolution. Rebellion, Osho says, happens elsewhere; on the individual level. It begins with awareness: with becoming more conscious of how you live, what you are being guided by, what you agree to, and what you have come to call your life simply because you have been living it for long enough. Its concern is less with defeating somebody than with ceasing to live a compliant life, blindly accepting everything that is handed to you.

I find that distinction hard to dismiss, especially at the moment. There is plenty around us that makes revolution seem appealing. Society increasingly asks you to take a side. Political conflicts, cultural conflicts, wars, identities, technologies, diets, parenting, sex, work: almost anything can become a position from which you are expected to declare yourself. Polarization offers ready-made camps and then invites you to choose one. At the same time, another force is at work. You are expected to keep becoming more productive, more informed, more employable, more efficient, more responsive and, preferably, more interesting while doing it. Technology saves time, and the saved time is promptly filled. You learn to work faster, so more work becomes possible. You reach yesterday’s limit, and tomorrow’s limit levels up.

During the past few decades, we have lived through the digital revolution, the internet revolution, the smartphone and social-media revolutions, and now the AI revolution. Each promised, in one form or another, to free something: information, communication, time, creativity, labor. Much has indeed changed. Yet, did life become any better? I feel that only the machinery has become faster, and we have become expected to keep pace with it. If you ask me, Osho has a point about the wheel.

What do we do? I would say that you can keep waiting for society to get to its senses. And may the odds be ever in your favor. You can also choose rebellion. Per Osho, rebellion is individual, not collective. It is not a struggle for political power, nor an attempt to replace one ruling order with another. It is a change in consciousness: becoming more alert, more aware of how you live, and less governed by habit, conditioning, and the crowd. Also, rebellion is affirmative. It begins with a “yes” to life, to yourself, and to living with greater awareness rather than automatically repeating what has been handed to you.

This reads much like what happens in psychoanalytic conversation. For an hour, you stop. There is no feed to catch up with, no task to finish, no argument to win, and no particular result you are expected to produce. We sit down and talk about you and your life, with enough time to stay with a subject instead of moving immediately to the next thing.

We might begin with something that happened during the week. A conversation has stayed with you, and you are not quite sure why. You notice that you reacted more strongly than the situation seemed to justify. You have made a decision and remain uncertain about what made you take it. You find yourself thinking about somebody you have not seen in years or realize that something you once wanted very much no longer interests you. Sometimes a memory comes up. Sometimes we notice the same kind of situation keeps occurring, or that two experiences you once thought unrelated may have something in common. There is no fixed list of subjects. We may talk about a relationship, a fear, an irritation, an ambition, a fantasy, a decision, a habit, a memory, a conflict, an idea, or an ordinary event with zero importance at first glance. You are more than free to arrive without anything in particular to discuss. Then we begin with whatever comes to mind and follow it.

My role is to listen with a different kind of attention that is usually allowed in an ordinary conversation. I listen for connections, repetitions, contradictions, shifts in feeling, and assumptions that you may have missed. I ask questions when there may be more to understand, and I use psychoanalytic knowledge to consider possible relationships in what you describe. Sometimes that means staying with one detail for longer than you normally would, and other times it means returning to something you mentioned weeks earlier. Often, we find new ways of looking at an experience. The work consists largely of examining what is already there, but closely enough for its meaning to become more visible.

It is almost unfashionable to spend an hour in this way. We are taught to justify attention by what it produces. We concentrate in order to solve a problem, acquire a skill, finish a task, improve our performance, or reach a goal. The same logic has entered much of what we now call personal development. You are encouraged to understand yourself so that you can perform better, regulate yourself so that you can become more effective, or work through a difficulty so that you can return to functioning as quickly as possible. Psychoanalytic conversation can certainly have practical consequences. If you understand your motives, reactions, and recurring patterns better, you make different choices. You may become less puzzled by yourself and others, or notice possibilities that were previously difficult to see. Yet practical improvement is not the reason for doing it. You are allowed to examine your life because it is your life, and attend to yourself just because. Who else is going to?

It’s very easy to slide into moving through life without paying attention to what you are actually living. This is where Osho’s idea of rebellion struck me as surprisingly familiar. It’s about becoming less governed by habit, conditioning, and the pressures of the crowd, and more conscious of your own life. Psychoanalytic conversation cultivates exactly this rebellious way of existing. For an hour, the madness outside loses its priority. You examine what you experience instead of rushing to respond in a way the world told you to. You stay with a feeling long enough to hear it; you consider a choice, a relationship, a memory, or a reaction without turning the examination into a plan for improvement.

That last point especially matters. I find it sad how we’ve become so used to conditioning any kind of self-reflection with a mental-health problem. Today, you need a diagnosis, a crisis, or at least a performance problem or a personal development goal to pay any serious attention to yourself. And sure, all these purposes have their merits. But I am convinced you are also allowed to invest your consideration in examining yourself and your life for its own sake. This was my vision for starting psychoanalytic conversation practice. I want it to give you the time and the company of someone trained to notice all that otherwise just passes by. Yes, the result can sometimes be useful in a practical sense. But the idea is to simply develop self-attendance, self-awareness, self-acquaintance, and self-understanding.

The world will continue to make claims on your attention. Technology will continue to accelerate, public life will continue to demand reactions, and work will continue to find new ways of expanding into whatever time remains. You cannot put a stop to all of that. You can refuse to let it occupy every part of your life. My work is a rebellion in that limited sense: against passing through years without once looking closely at them, against knowing everything that happened and very little about what it meant, and against treating your own experience, your own self, and your own life as something to attend to only when it becomes a problem.

This is how I am starting the rebellion, simply as that one hour in which nothing outside is more urgent than you. You are invited to join me.

September 18, 2026
When Your Therapist Thinks Being Childfree Is the Problem

Imagine booking an appointment because you’re starting to feel like shit after almost every conversation with your partner. They make jokes at your expense and accuse you of being oversensitive when you object; lately, you’ve caught yourself rehearsing perfectly ordinary sentences before saying them. Somewhere in the first session, your therapist asks about children, and when you explain that you’re childfree, and a new possibility suddenly interests them: perhaps your relationship has lacked the shared purpose that a family would provide. By the end of the hour, you’re defending your decision against parenthood while your partner’s behavior has disappeared from the discussion. Quite a result for someone who didn’t even attend.

You might entertain this suggestion for longer than you otherwise would. The person offering it has qualifications, presumably knows something you don’t, and has met you at a moment when your confidence in your own judgment is hardly magnificent. Perhaps there really is something you’ve overlooked. Asking about children is ordinary enough, after all, although the route from “I don’t want any” to “that explains why your relationship is miserable” deserves a few questions of its own. The fact that you need help doesn’t make every theory offered about you worth considering.

When an assumption becomes an interpretation

The assumption underneath the leap is that a complete adult life eventually includes parenthood, and anyone who declines must have misunderstood the assignment. You’ve probably met the person who assures you that you’ll understand real love once you have children, apparently writing off every attachment you’ve managed so far. The term for this is pronatalism and can enter the consulting room through theories that treat parenthood as a developmental achievement. As psychotherapist Emma Palmer discusses, some older accounts of women’s development gave motherhood a central place in psychological maturity. A therapist working from those assumptions may start wondering what went wrong before asking what went right.

You can see how judgments about a proper life become judgments about happiness in an experiment by psychologist Leslie Ashburn-Nardo. In the study, 197 university students evaluated a fictional married adult who had chosen to have either no children or two. The childfree adults were judged less psychologically fulfilled and elicited greater moral outrage. Nobody had measured these fictional people’s happiness, obviously; what the experiment captured was how observers imagined it. When someone confidently predicts that you’re unfulfilled, then, it’s worth asking how much they know about your experience and how much they’re supplying from their expectations.

What happens when you ask childfree people?

Researchers who ask childfree people about their lives have rather more relevant information. In a 2021 study of 981 Michigan adults, Jennifer Watling Neal and Zachary Neal found no statistically significant differences in life satisfaction between childfree adults and the other parental-status groups after accounting for demographic differences. Their study also did something that sounds elementary but matters enormously: it distinguished people who didn’t want children from people who had wanted them but couldn’t have them. Counting everybody with zero children together obscures whether that situation represents a disappointment, a temporary arrangement, or exactly the life someone wants.

Of course, you’re entitled to be childfree and unhappy. You can make a reproductive decision that suits you beautifully and still have a dreadful relationship, which is why arriving at therapy shouldn’t require a preliminary demonstration that your life choices have produced uninterrupted contentment. If having no children feels like a loss, there’s something to explore; if it doesn’t, an assumption of reproductive grief supplies you with an imaginary disappointment while the actual difficulty waits. The therapist still needs to establish what is troubling you and why their proposed explanation fits. You shouldn’t have to bring a happiness study to get back to your partner’s habit of humiliating you over dinner.

Whose wishes is the treatment serving?

There is another distinction worth keeping clear: being unhappy about your life and being worn down by other people’s objections to it. Suppose your parent keeps calling you selfish for refusing to give them grandchildren. You love them, so their disapproval hurts, even though your decision is settled. You may dread visiting because you know the subject will return before you’ve finished your coffee. By the time you bring this to therapy, there’s plenty to discuss about the relationship and what happens to you in it. A suppressed wish for parenthood would need evidence beyond the fact that these encounters upset you.

If the therapist responds by encouraging you to reconsider having children, your parent’s campaign has acquired a professional ally. You came looking for help with a painful demand and find yourself discussing whether you should satisfy it, perhaps because the therapist finds your parent’s wish so understandable that your refusal begins to seem like the problem. Understanding another person’s expectations doesn’t require fulfilling them, and being upset by criticism doesn’t mean the criticism has uncovered a truth you were avoiding. Producing another person is a fairly substantial concession to make for a calmerThanksgiving.

The interpretation you’re not allowed to disagree with

The conversation becomes especially difficult when every attempt to clarify your position confirms the therapist’s interpretation. You explain that you’ve considered parenthood carefully and don’t want it, which is described as rigidity; when you object, the objection becomes resistance. You could spend the hour examining yourself with almost indecent thoroughness and still fail to qualify as reflective, because the only acceptable discovery is that the therapist was right. Under those conditions, you have very little room and even the possibility that you know something about yourself becomes suspicious.

I’m a psychoanalyst, so I’m interested in the possibility that people misunderstand their own motives. That includes the person offering the interpretation. A claim about your unconscious needs support. Sometimes an interpretation hurts because you recognize something you’ve been avoiding. But other times it hurts because a person you hoped would understand you is insisting on an account that feels alien. The discomfort itself settles nothing. You should be able to ask how the therapist reached their conclusion and receive an explanation grounded in what you’ve said or done, with room to consider what might make that explanation mistaken.

Eventually, you may begin editing what you say. You don’t mention that lonely evening because you can already imagine where that will lead, and you become careful about admitting doubts in your relationship lest they reappear as evidence of your inability to commit. You may even catch yourself presenting a suspiciously cheerful account of being childfree, despite having booked the appointment precisely because you wanted somewhere to speak honestly. Now you’re managing the therapist’s impression of you as well as whatever brought you into treatment. It’s exhausting enough doing this with relatives; paying someone for the opportunity adds a particular insult.

A basic requirement of the job

A therapist’s understanding of a healthy adult life should accommodate parenthood and childfreedom on equal terms, without awarding extra points for reproduction. They can ask whether you want children, since having none doesn’t tell them whether that is a choice; once you’ve explained that you’re childfree, however, they have their answer. You owe no explanation of how you arrived at that decision, and you shouldn’t have to request that it stop being treated as unfinished business. Unless you choose to discuss it, the subject is closed. You have already supplied the information; persuading your therapist to accept it should never become part of your treatment.

If a therapist makes a pronatalist assumption, the mistake has already happened; you don’t have to object repeatedly before it qualifies as one. They should acknowledge it and correct it immediately. Examining the bias that produced it is their professional responsibility, and you have no obligation to spend your sessions helping them develop a less provincial understanding of adulthood, or to give them further chances to get this right. You came for help with a relationship in which you’re being belittled. That already provides plenty to discuss, and your therapist should be able to get on with the work without adding a baby to the mess.

September 4, 2026
Ceremoniousness in Therapy Culture

Lately, I’ve been seeing more therapy memes and more therapists making funny reels about their work. They share ridiculous moments from our working lives, speak without arranging their faces into expressions of profound concern, and occasionally admit that they, too, can be petty, mistaken, tired, or absurd. More therapists are beginning to sound like people you might actually know. It caught my attention because for a long time, the public image of my profession gave the impression that becoming a therapist required acquiring a new personality, complete with a superbly soft voice, an inexhaustible supply of sympathy, and a face permanently prepared for a difficult disclosure.

The professional face

You probably know the performance I mean. The therapist tilts their head, lowers their voice, and receives an ordinary sentence as if it has arrived from a remote and tragic civilization. Every feeling gets a solemn acknowledgment; every account of a disagreement seems to require a grave expression and a lesson about boundaries. Of course, people need to be heard, and some experiences deserve great care. What makes this particular manner questionable is its constancy. A person cannot be equally moved by everything. When concern becomes the default facial setting, it stops telling you what the therapist actually thinks or feels. You begin to wonder who’s behind it and at what point in their working day they switch on the professional mode.

I encountered this manner as a client and later, during my training, among clinicians. And I tell you, the backstage version could be even worse. In discussions with colleagues, the voice of compassionate authority sometimes to often gets dialed even higher as the competition is tougher. People speak as though their professional knowledge has carried them beyond the ordinary human tendencies to judge, compete, get irritated, or talk nonsense. That implied elevation is hard to bear when you only want to learn how people work and discover that you’re apparently also expected to join a priesthood. It leaves you wondering how much the pose gets between the clinician and what they’re supposed to be examining.

The client gets a part, too

The etiquette can recruit the client, too. If the expected therapist is an endlessly sympathetic witness, the expected client may become someone who arrives with an inventory of injuries, armed with the correct vocabulary for naming every slight. Others may feel pressure to display enough distress to justify the attention they receive. Someone can have been badly hurt and still find this script embarrassing; someone can genuinely lose control without performing anything at all. The point is that a room has its customs, and people learn them. When every account of being wronged receives the same reverent response, it becomes harder to ask a less comfortable question: what else was happening there, including in me?

Where did we get these customs? I suspect part of the answer lies in psychotherapy’s inheritance of medical authority and the expectation that a professional should possess a special composure. The profession also developed a language of attentive concern that can be useful in one conversation and stifling when applied to every conversation. Then there’s the older cultural habit of looking to an expert in human troubles for something like moral guidance. Few therapists, I imagine, set out to imitate priests, but the posture is recognizable: one person speaks as though they occupy higher ground while the other offers a confession. In a culture where psychological difficulties can also become conspicuous parts of an identity, both people have a remarkably elaborate set of roles available to them.

The people who never book

Some of the cost remains invisible because the people paying it never enter the consulting room. They take one look at the charades and imagine having to discuss their lives with someone who will call them brave for making a phone call, search their childhood for the meaning of a joke, or nod earnestly through an account of a perfectly ordinary bad day. They may have something serious they want to understand, perhaps a difficulty that keeps returning despite their efforts to change it. But that kind of gaze is simply to cringe to be a part of it. Others do book, spend the hour sitting in uncomfortable pomposity, and never return. They leave having been listened to, perhaps even kindly, while much of what they received had a funny aftertaste.

I understand that recoil. I’ve felt it as a client and as a clinician. I am one of those who need a conversation in which we can examine something painful without adopting a reverent tone. Concern can be expressed without every movement of the face being recruited to demonstrate exceptional compassion. The conversation itself should be the object of attention. Psychoanalysis gives us ways to listen for what a person doesn’t yet know about themselves and to question what initially appears obvious. That work asks us to acknowledge our participation in the human mess. If you ask me, pretending to float serenely above it makes the conversation rather difficult, as does expecting you to deliver your life in the approved vocabulary of wounds.

We can dispense with the priestly face

This is why the silly voices make me hopeful. A meme won’t reform psychotherapy, and a television character tells us little about what happens in actual consulting rooms. Still, when clinicians speak plainly and laugh at their professional habits, people can more easily imagine what talking to them might be like. As more of us work and speak across borders, those who find the old atmosphere intolerable have a better chance of finding someone with whom they can think out loud. I hope this irreverent corner of the profession keeps growing. Serious work requires skill and close attention, including the willingness to notice when you’re wrong. The priestly face contributes remarkably little to any of it.

August 19, 2026
Why I Work With Childfree Freethinkers

You’ve probably noticed how an ordinary conversation can acquire a surprising number of participants when you mention that you don’t have children. Some want your reasons, others predict your future, and someone who met you eleven minutes ago has already established that you would make a wonderful parent. Mention that you’re also an atheist, with zero interest in astrology or messages from the universe, and you’ll find yourself defending a second ordinary aspect of your life. You’ll end up spending the evening explaining yourself, all because of something you mentioned in passing between ordering dinner and asking for the wine. But over dinner, you can roll your eyes and eventually change the subject. In a consulting room, the same bullshit can become your treatment plan.

You might reasonably expect never to have that conversation with a psychotherapist at all. But people before you have been advised to trust the universe or Jesus. Worse, your decision to remain childfree may get that solemn nod, complete with a tilted head and widened eyes, and get promoted to your most urgent symptom. Now you’re defending the parts of your life you were perfectly happy with, while the problem you came to discuss is put on hold.

Being childfree and nonbelieving is a particularly inconvenient combination for anyone convinced that a proper life requires children and a higher power. Parenthood and religion supply comforting answers to questions about life and death. When neither applies to you, people can become remarkably concerned about where you’re supposed to find meaning, how you’ll be dying, and how you’ll live. The problem becomes especially unsettling when someone else’s inability to imagine your life becomes a professional opinion about your mental health. Being childfree and atheist can come with a peculiar requirement to remain relentlessly delighted or these choices become the universal suspects for every one of your difficulties. I’ve chosen to specialize in psychoanalysis for childfree freethinkers because you should be able to get help with what troubles you without being gaslit toward parenthood or a spiritual awakening.

When childfreedom explains everything

The underlying problem is the assumption that parenthood is the standard against which an adult life should be judged. Psychoanalysis has some history to answer for here. Some of our traditions treated motherhood as the destination of healthy female development, which meant that a woman who didn’t want children presented an awkward problem for the theory. Conveniently, the theory could be preserved by deciding that the problem was with her. Once you accept that explanation, any difficulty she brings can become further evidence of what she is missing, while the possibility that her childfreedom has nothing to do with it unnoticeably disappears.

In a 2006 study, Debra Mollen documented experiences of women having their normality questioned, including by therapists. Her recommendations included accepting childfree women as normal; apparently, that needed putting in print. You can see why it matters when wanting children is allowed to stand as a preference while not wanting them requires supporting documentation. An unhappy childhood becomes an explanation, and a reasonably happy one can be searched until a sufficiently unfortunate memory turns up. Your past influences your preferences, just as it influences a parent’s. Having a history doesn’t turn a preference into a disease.

The same assumption distorts how the rest of your life is understood. Being childfree can matter to a difficulty without being the difficulty itself: it may affect the expectations placed on you or the relationships through which you receive support. If a friendship changes after your friend has children, for example, you may miss the ease of being available to each other. Having a baby yourself would be a remarkably elaborate solution to wanting dinner with someone you love. The useful question concerns the loss you are describing and what it means in your circumstances, rather than whether parenthood would bring you back into line.

That distinction applies just as much when childfreedom has no apparent bearing on what brings you to therapy. A period of depression doesn’t prove that you need children, any more than a parent’s depression proves they should never have had them. You can have made choices that suit you and still be struggling. Nor do you owe anyone an extraordinary life as compensation: there is no requirement to leave a masterpiece where a family tree might otherwise have been, or to become impressive enough that the relatives finally shut up. Your difficulties deserve attention, and the pleasures of your life deserve to count without first proving that you were right not to become a parent.

The assumption that you need spirituality

Secular clients have their own reasons to wonder what assumptions they’ll encounter. A 2025 U.S. study of 120 nonreligious therapy clients found that 45 percent reported at least one instance of what the researchers classified as a microaggression against nonreligious people, including assumptions that they held religious beliefs. I personally share this experience. It weakens the therapeutic relationship at least. It is difficult to speak candidly when you’re busy calculating what your therapist might make of your nonbelief, or whether mentioning it will send the conversation somewhere you’d rather not go. Wanting to know where your therapist stands is a reasonable response to that uncertainty.

I’m an atheist, and I have no wish to smuggle the supernatural back into the room under a more fashionable name. Replacing god with the universe doesn’t make a supernatural explanation any more convincing. If someone tells you that your suffering was sent to teach you a lesson, you are entitled to wonder who approved the curriculum, and whether you can withdraw. You can want explanations grounded in biological laws of life without having your skepticism interpreted as a failure to be open. An approach can take your feelings seriously while remaining entirely uninterested in what the cosmos or e deity might be trying to tell you.

When someone dies, the same need for wishful thinking becomes even less amusing. You may find the finality unbearable while remaining quite certain that an afterlife is a fantasy. Telling you that you’ll meet again asks you to accept a claim you don’t believe in order to receive the comfort being offered. You are entitled to someone who can acknowledge the loss on the terms in which you experience it, including the unfinished conversation for which you don’t expect another chance. Having to explain that position becomes an absolutely excessive burden at a time when life already requires considerable effort.

The point of specializing

My reason for specializing is to make this understanding part of the starting point. It lets me approach your difficulties in the context of the life you’re actually living, with some familiarity with the pressures you may face and no expectation that becoming a parent or acquiring a faith would put things right. Those difficulties may be closely connected to your childfreedom and nonbelief, or have nothing to do with them. Either way, you should be able to seek help without having to demonstrate that your entire life is justified before we can take its particular problems seriously.

In regular online psychoanalytic sessions, we work on the concerns that bring you and the patterns that keep them going. We pay attention to what you say and what becomes difficult to say, including reactions you may not yet understand, and consider how your experiences have shaped the way you respond now. Questions and interpretations help us examine what keeps happening, with the aim of making changes possible. Your childfreedom and nonbelief provide some of the context; the work concerns the difficulties you want help with and the life you want to lead.

August 16, 2026
Emotional Competence and What Psychoanalysis Can Do for It

You can understand perfectly well that a critical remark is no great catastrophe and still spend the evening arguing with its author in your head. You can know that someone loves you and find their temporary unavailability intolerable. Being intelligent helps you explain these reactions, sometimes with impressive sophistication, but the explanation may do remarkably little to change them. You remain upset, now with a theory. Emotional competence concerns what you can do with this discrepancy: how accurately you recognize what you feel, how you understand its causes, and how much choice you have in responding.

Much of your life depends on these capacities, including parts you may think have little to do with emotions. Whether you can enjoy an afternoon off depends partly on what happens when you stop being productive. The work you postpone may involve a task you dislike, or the prospect of finding out that you are less accomplished than you would prefer. A disagreement can remain a disagreement, or become an exhausting attempt to establish that you are still loved. In each case, understanding the emotional difficulty changes what you can do about it. Another productivity trick is unlikely to resolve the humiliation you anticipate whenever you attempt something unfamiliar.

Feelings have reasons, including some you may disagree with

The affective science, evolutionary psychology, and neuropsychoanalysis that inform my work explain basic emotional systems as part of human evolutionary inheritance. These systems help organize responses to needs and opportunities, including protection from danger and connection with others. You are born with basic emotional systems, but experience shapes what triggers them and how you respond. For example, the capacity to feel fear is innate, while a fear of disagreement can develop through experience. Learned responses can change, even though the capacity to feel fear remains.

Evolution has supplied no guarantee that your emotional reactions will suit the life you want. You can want people’s approval even when you disagree with them. You might be entirely certain that you do not want children, for instance, and still feel guilty when your parents express their disappointment. Feeling guilty doesn’t mean you’ve made the wrong decision. It may reveal how difficult it is to disappoint them, what you believe you owe them, or what you expect will happen if you refuse. You can explore why you feel guilty without questioning your decision not to have children.

Feelings influence what attracts your attention and what seems plausible. When you are ashamed, an ambiguous expression can look like contempt; when you are angry, you may find evidence of someone’s selfishness with an efficiency otherwise unavailable to you. This does not mean every emotional judgment is mistaken. Someone may actually be treating you badly. It means that a feeling and your explanation of that feeling need to be examined separately. “I feel rejected” tells us something about your experience. Whether you have been rejected, by whom, and on what grounds requires further investigation.

Getting beyond “I feel bad”

Emotional competence begins with identifying what you feel. “Stressed” can describe the way you feel before a difficult conversation, but it leaves much unexplained. You might fear the other person’s anger, resent having to accommodate them again, or feel ashamed of wanting something they may refuse. Several feelings can be present at once. Differentiating them gives you a more useful account of the situation: resentment about an arrangement you keep accepting calls for a different response from embarrassment about asking for something reasonable. Research on emotional awareness supports the importance of identifying and distinguishing feelings for their regulation.

Even when you recognize what you feel, you may struggle to accept it, especially if it conflicts with how you like to see yourself. This becomes difficult when it conflicts with your preferred account of yourself. You may value generosity and envy a friend’s success, or value independence while wanting rather a lot of reassurance. If envy is unacceptable, you can spend months developing an unnecessarily elaborate critique of your friend’s work. Admitting that you want something they have is less flattering but considerably more useful. You can then consider what you want to pursue, what disappoints you about your circumstances, and whether your friend really needs to suffer for any of it.

Emotional competence also helps you understand and communicate with other people. When you can explain what upset you and why, you give the other person something specific to respond to. Understanding their feelings helps you make sense of their behavior and consider what matters to them, even when you disagree. You can then address the difficulty more directly: discuss what each of you needs, negotiate a disagreement, or decide what you are willing to accept. This also makes closeness easier, because you can express affection and ask for support more openly.

What we examine in psychoanalysis

In psychoanalysis, we explore why you react in ways you find difficult to change. Suppose you agree to something you do not want to do, then spend the next two days resenting the person who asked. Advice to be more assertive may be perfectly reasonable, but it leaves open why saying no was so difficult. We might examine what you expected the refusal to cost you, how quickly that expectation arose, and whether you even noticed your reluctance before agreeing. The aim is to understand the process well enough that the familiar response becomes available for reconsideration.

Some of this process may happen outside your awareness. Perhaps being agreeable became a reliable way to preserve affection, and you now comply before consciously considering what you want. That is one possibility to investigate. Your present circumstances also matter: refusing a request sometimes carries a real cost. Questions and interpretations help us distinguish what is happening now from what you anticipate on the basis of previous experience. Psychoanalytic work also examines how familiar expectations appear in the relationship with the analyst.

You might, for example, agree with an interpretation because disagreeing feels rude, then leave the session irritated that you were misunderstood. If you can examine that exchange, the difficulty becomes something you can address while it is happening. You get to question the interpretation and discover how the other side responds. Repeatedly experiencing a different response can help change what you expect from others, even when understanding why you expect it hasn’t helped. Understanding why you accommodate people does not automatically make it easier to disagree with them.

My focus on feelings informs these conversations. We identify and differentiate what you experience, trace connections with your expectations and behavior, and use relevant concepts when they clarify something. We can develop ideas and experiments together during our conversations. There is no requirement to turn every feeling into a project, and no special merit in producing a beautifully reasoned account of yourself while continuing to live exactly as before. Understanding yourself can help you notice your reactions sooner and choose how to respond.

Understanding your feelings can also help you enjoy life more. Emotional competence is useful even when life is going well, too: recognizing what interests you, allowing affection without immediately questioning it, or enjoying time off without having to earn it through exhaustion. You will still experience feelings you would rather do without, and occasionally behave in ways you understand better afterward. The change we are working toward is greater agency over how you live with those feelings, including the capacity to reconsider the arrangements that keep producing them. You don’t need to have a problem to benefit from understanding your feelings.

May 13, 2026