The Natural Constituency...(4.8.26)

 

Being a therapist is strange work at the best of times, and over the last year I've been thinking about my practice, how I work, and what I believe about therapy. For me, months and years tend to blur into epochs, and each epoch seems to have its own emotional tone. Certain difficulties seem as though they appear in bunches, and that shapes what you come to feel is the emotional heartbeat of each epoch. That in turn seems to shape how I feel about therapy. Whether this is because the world has changed, people accessing therapy have changed, or because this therapist himself has changed, I couldn't say with confidence. Probably ‘all of the above’.

In this current epoch, running a smaller practice, I find myself dealing with questions of meaning and belonging much more often than I would have expected a few years ago. This includes topline categories like anxiety and depression, but this would sell it short. I think what I detect is really a kind of 'structural loneliness'. Where do I belong? Who naturally stands around me? Who knows me? What happens when I am loved but not quite central in my own life? And what if I feel I am neither loved nor embedded anywhere?

These are hard questions, and in some ways the hardest questions, as therapy can't simply solve them by improving someone's thinking. There's no convenient "tool or technique" ™ to magic up a resolution. So a person can be psychologically insightful, emotionally literate, professionally successful and possibly deeply loved, and still find herself wondering whether she has a natural place in the world.

Variations of this from clients seem common, and as I edge closer to fifty I've been thinking about this too. I sometimes say so and I'm not always sure people believe me. There remains the understandable (albeit generous) idea that therapists have probably sorted out such questions in their own lives. What I’d hope a therapist may have learned, if anything, is to think about these tricky questions a bit longer before reaching for false comfort, and to see that certain pains are signs that a person is touching something real.

One of these uncomfortable questions concerns the difference between being loved and having what I now think of as a "natural constituency". A natural constituency doesn't mean popularity, status, or a big circle of friends. It means the people among whom one's life has an obvious place. These would be the people you turn towards - and who turn towards you - without anyone having to explain why. An example of this from my own life would be my parents. Being with them I have no sense of having to justify myself at all, I can just be me. This is a blessing and I am lucky. Of course, one's constituency may not contain relatives. Your constituency contains people for whom your presence is not an arrangement, a kindness, a role, or a negotiated inclusion, but simply part of the furniture of the world. Their presence simply gives you somewhere natural to stand. No decoding, role ambiguity or performance. Just your people.

You can spot these constituencies easily at larger functions, where people inevitably drift towards their own at various points of an evening. I saw this in action at a recent 80th birthday party.  Parents towards children, children towards parents, siblings towards each other, old friendship groups together and so on. There's a sort of "regrouping" and "release valve" for those who have this setup. It needn’t be a sentimental or even especially warm scene, indeed a lot of the time constituencies can be bored, irritated, distracted, and resentful, and still gravitationally bound to one another. That gravity is what I’m describing.

A natural constituency isn't the same as love, either. It would be a mistake to think the two are necessarily connected, although they often go together of course. Love itself can be deep and real and freely given, and still not create the automatic field of belonging I'm describing. What natural constituency involves, over and above love, is a particular kind of generosity, the generosity of wanting to know someone. This involves things like keeping their stories, asking things about them, and absorbing their history into the lore that families, friendships or certain communities accumulate over time. Constituency, in the fullest sense, is a rolling psychological basecamp in which who you are goes on being learned. It is knowing others, and being known yourself. A mutual curiosity that contains the past and rolls onwards in the present. There is a sharing of biography involved too. Within a constituency, the stories of other people become part of your own fable.

Some have this in abundance. Others would describe themselves as having no such constituency at all. Many are in the middle, occupying positions in which they are structurally important and much loved, but without the known-ness that defines a proper constituency. A person can have a real place in a family or friendship group, be included, depended on and genuinely cared about, and still find that a deeper curiosity about them does not accrue. For some, this creates a crisis of belonging - they are central to the proceedings of their lives, but not fully embedded among people for whom their history and whole person remain alive objects of interest. This becomes especially painful in difficult years, when mood dips, life is at its toughest, and being accurately known is more crucial than ever.

Therapists curse: talking about such things often means you examine your own life for comparable data. I notice it in areas my life, the way most people would. Something mentioned from an earlier chapter in my life is heard politely, with a smile, and then quickly dropped, while the same kind of material from someone inside the constituency draws rapt attention from all. That is where the lore is kept, where the code gets written to the shared database, and those outside it will only ever have a toe or two in the water.

I see it in my work. I suspect I often know more about the basic shape of a client's life than some of the people in that client's warmest relationships outside the room. And the reverse is true too. Over a long piece of work the plain facts of my own life tend to surface, because they turn out to be a natural part of the relationship. The core biography emerges over time, in service of the work. With warmth, I've noticed that some people I see in therapy end up knowing much more of it than some people in valued, loving and long-standing relationships of mine outside the room ever have.

I should say I see constituency in my life in other directions, as do many others. For me, nieces and nephews are usually pretty hungry to hear the jabberings and stories of Uncle Steve (poor them), and some others know the full length of things. So I have a degree of insurance from taking it to heart too much. Others I have met are not so lucky. 

There is often an entirely unmalicious resistance to hearing information that would make a person more biographically or emotionally three-dimensional than the version people have already settled on. In this way you are loved. The love does not need the person you also are. There is something oddly funny about being close to people over years, being loved and included, and yet realising that whole territories of who you were before them simply don't exist for them, and are not going to. The arrangement works well enough without it, and others already occupy the spaces available for constituency lore.

One way or another, this topic is never too far away in the therapy room in this epoch. It is an interesting fact for a person to sit with, and while it takes away nothing from the importance of those relationships for people, it also seems to change how ordinary social moments are experienced.

There are moments in ordinary social life when someone tells me with real pride about the achievements, milestones, or good fortune of people in their constituencies, and I feel something in me step back and disengage a little. I used to judge this reaction as coldness or envy or some unattractive failure of generosity, and sometimes there may be a tiny bit of that in it. But it is a tiny part. Something else is happening. It is the sensation of standing outside a story whose emotional significance, and so engagement, depends partly on being inside it. The achievement may be real, the pride entirely understandable, the good news genuinely good. But reflected glory is not easily available to someone who has no authorship in the story, without the constituency privileges that lead to experiencing events as though from within.

It is a specific feeling, hard to describe although I’ve now heard quite a few people attempt it. It’s also a specific way of seeing. If you talk about it enough (therapists curse again), you start noticing it around you. Some people are surrounded by their own. Others are moving more at the edges of things. At the recent 80th I found myself spotting the difference. 

Many people know some version of this, though it is not talked about much. And though a life can look one way from the outside, the reality on the inside is often different. It comes up in therapy more than you might think. The specific situations differ but the basic phenomenon is the same.

Therapists have a particular version of this, another part of the oddity of the work. We are given real entry into other people's constituencies, but on a time-limited visa. The relationships are deep and genuine, but also structurally bounded, and both parts of that are true. What passes between therapist and client can form a deep constituency, but when the therapy ends the client walks out into the rest of their life and the therapist has no right to extension. That’s as it should be. But it does mean that therapists spend their working lives being closely involved in constituencies they won’t remain part of, and doing so with people who may or may not have equivalent constituencies of their own. For a client who is thin on constituency outside the room, the visa can itself become part of the material - the exposure of opening up to a relationship with a set frame. And for the therapist, moving through many constituencies on this kind of visa produces a specific alertness to the phenomenon, and to what constituency is doing in their own life by comparison. It forces you to think about belonging a little more.

The pressure most of us are living under is that modern life makes constituency harder to inherit and harder to sustain. We are freer than previous generations to leave, move, remarry, cut contact, build chosen families, and refuse inherited roles. Much of this is genuine liberation. But certainly, while many of the old structures were not always kind, they also gave many people a place in the world that did not have to be personally invented from scratch. We have not fully replaced that. More choice, but often less embeddedness. More contact, but less witness. So we get the freedom but sometimes with fewer people who can recognise the self we once were in relation to the self we are now.

The question is how to live truthfully with whichever hand you have been dealt, or have dealt yourself. Therapy can’t help by pretending to solve what can't be solved. It can help a person stop pathologising the ache, and distinguish it from similar feelings that get mistaken for it. I would hope it helps by also knowing when to suggest stopping the analysis. Months and years can be lost to pain excavation and archaeology. So it can also help a person notice where they are already claimed, even if not in the form they first imagined. Constituency is not only biological. There are people who gather around a person because of trust, gratitude, affinity, friendship, shared work, or repeated acts of care. A person can become a place to which others return. Not always in the shape once imagined, but still it can happen.

The need to be known across time, among people who don't have to decide afresh whether we have some importance, is not childish and not vanity. It is part of being human. When that need is missing, partial, or built late, the ache deserves respect rather than shame. Not obedience - the ache does not always know what to do with itself - but respect. It is telling us something true about being a person among other persons, and about the specific difficulty of living in the times we now live in.

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Steve Perkins is a Consultant Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor in private practice in Shoreham-by-Sea and the City of London. He is the author of Moral Singularity: Life Inside Closed Moral Worlds and Why Moral Conversation Breaks Down (2026), and writes on therapeutic enclosure, conviction cascades, the interpretive ratchet, and the structural dynamics of closed moral systems.

MBACP (Accred)
www.whitestonetherapy.com