Research has shown that we often judge ourselves harshly and that we tend to experience negative emotions more quickly and with greater intensity than positive emotions. The nervous ape doesn’t like to be vulnerable or ask difficult questions. Reality can feel threatening. Of course, we may truly believe that loving the work and seeing more clearly is the better approach — the true path to sustainable safety, satisfaction, and success — but the nervous ape needs calming and convincing to go that route.

Like Elizabeth, we can take on a catastrophe to stop ourselves feeling and thinking – and to avoid responsibility for our own intimate acts of destruction.

Unsolvable trauma is unsolvable but it is not unresolvable.

In the next series of sessions, as my project got underway, this notion of finding the clinging was often paramount. What could I do to surprise, unsettle, and enliven my patients’ inner lives? While not necessarily religious, these interventions, when successful, could certainly feel spiritual.

I have such a hard time relaxing,” she says. “With men especially, and if I’m attracted to them it’s worse.” There is a longing in April to be known, to be reached, and to be seen, but she is frightened of it at the same time and cannot help but throw up obstacles seemingly in spite of herself. She might spill something in such a situation, for instance. When immersed in her work, April is the opposite. She can be funny, irreverent, spontaneous, innovative, and free. We talk about the paradox. When she loses herself, she is being herself.

The French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva says, making a fine distinction, that we should find language and images that are “lucid counterdepressants rather than neutralizing antidepressants.” You want to find a way to counter your heaviness without denying it or even escaping it. You don’t want to neutralize your sadness, but you want to find ways not to succumb to it. This is a fine but crucial line to walk.