In Praise of Messy

Lately I’ve been thinking about how often we want a clear path to follow. In therapy or in life.

On the surface, therapy can seem like a specific, defined process. A client comes to therapy with an issue or something they’re not happy with, and working together the client and therapist find solutions and make changes so they can emerge from the other end. It is tempting to suggest there is a neat trajectory that the work can follow; a set of steps you can move through to reach the end.

The desire to have clear steps, or that sense of progress is natural and normal. We all want to know what we’re trying to achieve, what is expected of us, and what we can hope to get out of something. Especially when we’re spending a lot of time and money on it. However, presenting therapy as a clear process with a defined outcome is rarely honest about how it works.

The desire for order

Perhaps we all learnt too well the lesson from school that a story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Or that we must produce something specific, almost something we can point to. “Look what I made!”

A modern obsession with watching cutdown videos of people completing projects, or watching dramas with carefully crafted storylines, or worse watching both at the same time, doesn’t help shift the sense that this is how life works.

The reality is, things are often much messier than. Much less precise or tidy. Our efforts might end before we expected, part way through the supposed “middle”. Or worse, stop somehow in the beginning, some halting, abortive, screeching to the ideas that we had. Or the project could veer off in a new direction, encompassing things we had never anticipated would be included.

Messiness also shows up in who we are and how we conduct our lives. In the internal contrasts we have- of wanting freedom but continually seeking structures that limit or restrict us in ways we find frustrating. Or wanting to lead vastly different lives, almost simultaneously.

In truth, as human beings we contain multitudes. This is a source of infinite wonder, and infinite frustration.

How we sit with messiness

So, what can we do about it? Planning a neat way out of the messiness can’t work, we’re just trying to fit a storybook model back on when we’ve acknowleged that it’s not possible. Instead, we have to sit with it. Embrace the messiness.

Sitting with the uncertainty, the messiness, is not easy. When we’re fed the message at things need to have a neat narrative structure, a clear goal or outcome, anything else can feel like failure. To overcome this sense of failure we need to time to embrace the feeling and to reacquaint ourselves with all the complexities that we stripped out of the problem when we set a singular goal.

Because the simple stories we’ve been told have always been messy truths- they’ve just been refined, crafted into neatness. The messiness is not an aberration of the story: it is seeing the full horizon. The story in technicolour.

I’ve been wrestling with the messiness of not updating this blog regularly, feeling it says something about me as a therapist, or fails to meet the needs of those reading it. But what if, instead, I were to embrace the fact I don’t have something to say consistently? That instead of churning out content like a machine, it could grow more organically, being added to when I have an idea and some energy. Would what comes out of it be more genuine? More honest? Possibly more thoughtful.

Messiness as freedom

I will not offer you some neat solution to this, a handy hint or particular trick to use. That would be entirely counter to the idea of what this messiness means.

It is in the messiness that we can be free, that we are able to authentically be ourselves, because we are not using our energy on the little micro-ways we reign ourselves in, appearing neat and tidy. We are not trying to fit disparate ideas into a tiny box or crafting the perfect narrative of a project instead of being in the steps. We get to hear the full story, no matter how messy.