The Importance of Community

There is a reason that classic analysis was a process that happened multiple days a week, over a long period of time. Emotional attunement is necessary for proper emotional development, and things go badly wrong when children do not get that support consistently. To repair those wounds takes time, consistency, and deep focus on the person who needs healing.

One of the reasons I no longer work with children, though I deeply enjoyed the time I spent working as a school counselor, is that it breaks my heart to witness most of the parents I have come across who want their children to be in therapy. 50 minutes a week is no substitute for the kind of daily, ongoing attunement that young people need for normal development. 

And unfortunately, very few people can afford the cost of classic analysis, and the people who make it available are generally in very high demand. Few of us will ever have the privilege of 4-5 sessions a week, for years at a time.

What is more accessible in a healthy society is communal care.

Ideally clients coming to a therapy process will also have loved ones around them—friends and family—who can help them through their emotional recovery process alongside the expert help of a licensed therapist or wise consultant. Specific affinity groups like 12 step programs, group therapy, religious community, or even simple shared activities done with others on a regular basis are, I think, meant to fill in the gaps. They provide a container for the sort of humanity that our brains and bodies were designed for—co-regulation, shared thought, mutual understanding. These are the places we need to be to feel held, to feel not alone. And while online spaces for this sort of connectedness are an important tool of modern life, and a brilliant way to connect with aligned others at a distance, they don’t provide the multisensory and energetic experience of being in shared reality with others. It’s my belief that this cannot be skipped over, that it is a need for every person who wants to not simply survive but to flourish.

There is an appreciation I have for the diversity of gifts that human beings bring. One of the innovations of capitalism was the recognition that there is a great deal of progress that can be made quickly when people diversify their specializations, and share those skills with each other. Unfortunately, in the modern world so much of people’s time has been captured contributing those specialized skills to companies that very little seems to be available for families and communities. There’s been a strange flip—companies get to have a diversity of skillful people creating something that can achieve things rapidly, while human beings are expected to take care of their private lives almost entirely on their own. To me, this is a tragedy. When I consider what is possible, what I have personally experienced when people come together with love and time for one another, and then the realities of most people’s lives, I mourn what is lost.

My hope is that these things can change. That in the recognition of the backwards orientation of this pattern, more people will prioritize sharing their gifts with one another. It is certainly the way I try to live, and what I hope to help my clients find.