When do you feel free?

When I asked myself this question the first thing that came to mind was the freedom I feel when I am able to fully engage in relationship totally as myself. Not in a life and soul of the party sense, but to allow myself to be known in whatever I might be feeling. Free from feeling too much, too loud, too messy or completely contradictorily too little. Free from holding myself to static expectations of myself. I love the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s concept of ‘formless states’, in which we are free from the pressure to even ‘make sense’.

I also feel free in moments in which I am totally absorbed, in my body, dancing, in my sensual self, in nature, playful light moments in my life. Free in animated, embodied flow. Free in the ritual and solitude of the making and savouring of my morning cup of coffee, waking up to myself.

I wonder what your answers were, and whether you too noticed two sets of answers - freedom from, and freedom in?

Perhaps I want to add a third freedom too, in which we are driven to fight for freedom for something. I’m reminded of a particularly passionate performance by Nina Simone in Montreux in 1976 of ‘I wish I knew how it would feel to be free’. Look it up if you get a moment, it is incredible. The performance holds and exudes her fight with white oppression: her fight for the right to her talent, and her music, performed her way. Her freedom in this moment, has brought inspiration to me at key points in my life for my own uprisings.

Freedom is a good thing right? Yet, both in my own reflections and in my clinical work the human ambivalence towards freedom becomes apparent.

Freedom might be feared. It isn’t for us; it is too big, it is too ruleless, it is too unknown, it’s too visible. The converse pull might be for privacy, or to be small as a means of going unnoticed. Here we can still experience freedom, but of a different kind, a quieter freedom, under the radar, in solitude. This is not the solitude which is life avoidant, rather, a solitude which can feel life giving and sustaining. In this there could be deep peace.

We are all probably familiar with the metaphor of the caged bird, singing on their perch, the cage door open, but they don't fly away. They are safe there, it's familiar. My own pull is to whisper ‘go little bird … there’s a big world out there’, but the bird stays and continues to sing, seemingly unaware of their confinement.

As a relational psychotherapist I guide clients to explore how their past has shaped the way they think and feel, they way they relate to themselves and others, the way the hold, and move their bodies, dis-ease, held in the body impacting physical health, giving rise to auto-immune conditions. 

I am a passionate believer in this work. It offers us freedom from stuck patterns of relating and ways of being which don't serve us, and gives us choice and agency in our current day lives.

This process is frequently not without its opposition. 

Those ways of being in the world, just like the caged bird, are familiar to us, we know what we are dealing with, at one point in our life they served us, and kept us safe. We might long for change, feel frustrated at the intransigence of patterns of behaviour which we know restrict us; cause us distress and pain. Yet we also fear the very change we seek. 

We have to hold the space for these warring factions, they both have a point of view.

Intrapsychically we can only ever truly seek freedom when we feel safe.

We all have a need, and a right to both freedom and safety, connection and privacy. We all have a right to not be captured in a definition of ourselves, either our own or others, rather the freedom to go on being, continuing to become. 

In a space held by curiosity, not assuming an answer, we can understand our own unique balance and tipping point in the tensions, and the supporting functions of opposites - not in the fear led stance of old survival patterns, but in a stance responsive to you, your feelings and your needs. A stance which acknowledges your choice.

Perhaps we feel free when we soften knowing we are safe in the others' response; knowing what we demand of, and for ourselves, is just; finding a little more trust in the universe; and in allowing the complimentary balance between connection and privacy and solitude. 

To end I find myself returning to Winnicott’s words

‘in life’s sophisticated game of hide and seek, it is a joy to hide, but a disaster not to be found’.

Is freedom granting ourselves permission to hide, and the choice to step forth and be known, and seen. For is it not in the activity of choice, not what we choose, where true freedom lies? Freedom to live actively as us.

My Parting Questions -

Letting Winnicott’s words land in you -

How do you hide in your life, when the motivation is safety? Do you have anything which hides because you are choosing not to look? How do you hide in a privacy which is nourishing, recharging, life giving? What has it felt like in the moments in your life when you have been truly found? What has if felt like in moments in your life when you have hidden so well you could not be found?

Please get in touch if anythig you have read has sparked an interest to look more suearmstrongtherapy@gmail.com