A physical monkey trap is a simple device. A banana is place inside a weighted bottle with a narrow neck and placed under a monkey tree. The monkey comes along, smells the banana and reaches in to grab it, only to find the neck too small for it to withdraw its fist. It could fee itself easily; it has only to let go. But it really wants that banana. So it holds on. And it is still holding on when the trapper comes to collect it.
A psychological monkeytrap works in the same way. It is any situation that tempts us to hold on when we should let go — to control what cannot or should not be controlled.
I became a therapist for the same reason I entered therapy: banana-seeking.
The main banana I sought was relief from helplessness.
Like many of my clients, I grew up in a dysfunctional family. Dad was alcoholic, mom was depressed. While they were together, they fought, which was scary. After they divorced their illnesses intensified, which was scary in new ways.
So my childhood was an anxious and confusing one. Navigating it was like swimming in water with a strong undertow. I was always struggling with an invisible emotional current, always at risk for being dragged under.
I learned early to stay afloat by managing the feelings of people around me.
I did not think of it as managing then. Kids don’t. To a kid it just feels like paying attention.
I remember sitting at the top of the stairs as a kid, listening to my parents argue below, trying to guess from the pitch of their voices whether it was safe to come down. And after the divorce I remember walking into my house and being able to sense, even before I saw her, whether my mother was having a bad day.
That kind of attention becomes a skill. Eventually it becomes a personality.
Do it long enough and it becomes a career.
I don’t believe every therapist comes from a home like mine. But I’m never surprised when I meet one who has. Such households quietly set a child up to find a legitimate, respectable home for their childhood job — reading rooms, managing feelings, making people okay.
Psychotherapy, I’ve come to believe, will hire you for exactly the skills you built to survive.
In retrospect I see how I misread my childhood situation.
The misreading was inevitable, given the blurred boundaries in my family. I could not help but confuse externals with internals. When dad had a bad day, it became my bad day. When mom was sad, I felt pulled into her sadness. When they fought, there was no escaping the war zone.
So I came naturally to the conclusion that my problems were dad’s drinking and mom’s depression and their fighting, all of which created my fear and my helplessness.
These were not imaginary problems. And the feelings they generated in me were legitimate emotional reactions to family dysfunction.
But my response veered into dysfunction with my misreading of how to relieve those feelings.
I concluded, as do many kids in similar situations, that I was somehow responsible for my parents’ unhappiness, that if I tried I could somehow fix it, and that such fixing represented my only hope to escape fear and helplessness.
This was my first monkeytrap.
It was not my last.
My childhood also left me with unmet emotional needs, which inevitably found their way into my work as a therapist
Some were needs concerning myself, like the need to feel safe and confident.
Some concerned the client, like the need to understand and be understood.
And some concerned the relationship, like the need to feel trusted and connected.
And beneath all three groups: the need not to feel helpless.
Fear of helplessness would become my main vulnerability as a therapist.
One of the oddities of growing up in dysfunction is that it can provide excellent training for the helping professions.
A child who learns to monitor other people’s moods develops sensitivity. A child who learns to anticipate trouble develops vigilance. A child who tries to keep peace becomes skilled at mediation. A child who learns to put other people’s needs first may become empathic and attentive. A child who survives by understanding the adults around him may become unusually interested in why people behave as they do.
What began as survival skills can, years later, look like gifts.
Kids who enter adulthood with these gifts may gravitate towards professional helping.
Again, I do not believe people become therapists only to work out their childhood problems, or that empathy, sensitivity, curiosity, or a wish to help are pathological.
I mean something simpler:
A child may spend years learning skills that later find a legitimate professional home.
Psychotherapy is one such home.
It offers an adult occupation in which paying close attention to other people’s feelings is not intrusive but required. Understanding people is not merely a private preoccupation but a professional skill. Helping is not just permitted but expected. Trying to relieve suffering is not a childhood fantasy but part of the job description.
For someone trained early to manage the emotional environment, this can feel awfully familiar.
The problem is not that the childhood adaptation survives. Most of our childhood adaptations survive in one form or another. The problem comes when the adaptation remains unexamined and continues doing the same emotional job it did when we were young.
Then helping can become Plan A with a license.
Plan A is how I describe the set of conclusions we develop as children, an internalized set of assumptions and rules about life, feelings, relationships and how to handle them.
I tell clients that we each have a Plan A, and that we each learn it in the same place and the same way. The place is our family, and the way is unconsciously.
No one sits us down at the kitchen table and says “Listen up. Here’s how you do Life.” They just do Life themselves, and we watch and listen and soak it up like little sponges.
And the conclusions we reach become a set of firm, unexamined internal truths.
At least, that’s how I see what happened to me.
I came out of childhood carrying a set of conclusions and misreadings that now seem a virtual invitation to professionalize my Plan A:
If I can understand what is happening, maybe I will be safe.
If I can keep everyone calm, maybe nothing bad will happen.
If I can be useful enough, maybe I will matter.
If I can become what other people need, maybe they will keep me.
If I can solve the problem, maybe I will not have to feel helpless.
The therapist can say much the same things in more sophisticated language.
If I can understand this patient, I will feel competent.
If I can relieve this patient’s anxiety, I will feel effective.
If I can get this couple to stop fighting, I will feel successful.
If this patient trusts me, I will know I am trustworthy.
If my interpretation lands, I will know I understand.
If the patient gets better, I will know I am good at this.
Nothing is wrong with a therapist wanting any of those things.
The trouble begins when the therapist needs them.
~ Adapted from Monkeytraps for Therapists: Working With Compulsive Control in Psychotherapy
