Freedom and Refrain

Something I've noticed in my practice lately is that many therapeutic interventions begin, somewhat paradoxically, by narrowing rather than expanding the way a client is invited to think. I might ask someone to picture themselves at five years old in as much detail as they can, imagine attending their own funeral many decades from now, or consider how they might be different if they woke tomorrow and the one thing that seems to be troubling them had somehow disappeared. Although these exercises emerge from different therapeutic approaches, they share something important. Each introduces a carefully chosen constraint that invites a different way of seeing.

As I reflect on this, it reminds me of one of my favourite poetic forms: the villanelle. A villanelle is highly structured—nineteen lines arranged into five tercets and a final quatrain, with two refrains returning according to a fixed pattern. I first encountered the form as a young woman reading Sylvia Plath's Mad Girl's Love Song, a poem that resonated with me profoundly at the time. As the two refrains returned, their meaning deepened through their changing relationship to the lines around them. By the poem's end, the same words seemed to inhabit a different world. The form did not limit what the poem could express. Somehow, it made that expression possible, and perhaps this is why these therapeutic interventions strike me as poetic.

Like a poetic form, they ask us to accept a temporary constraint. Rather than reflecting on our lives from wherever our thoughts happen to wander, they invite us to inhabit a particular standpoint. We see our present life through the eyes of the child we once were. We imagine a future in which today's struggle no longer dominates our lives. We speak from one part of ourselves while allowing other voices to wait their turn. None of these perspectives offers a complete picture. Each is intentionally partial. Yet it is often through this deliberate narrowing of attention that something previously unnoticed comes into view.

There is a temptation to think that insight comes from broadening our perspective until we can somehow see everything at once. Increasingly, I wonder whether the opposite is true. We begin to understand ourselves more fully by looking more carefully from one small place at a time.

This idea extends well beyond therapy. Artists have long known that creativity often flourishes within structure and form. A blank page can be surprisingly difficult to inhabit, while a set of rules can offer a place to begin. Philosophers, too, have pushed against the idea that freedom is the absence of limits. For Simone de Beauvoir, freedom is always situated, taking shape within the given conditions of a life and alongside the freedom of others. Responsibility, commitment, relationships, and the realities of our situation do not restrict our freedom. They are the conditions that make freedom possible. I wonder whether something similar happens in therapy.

A carefully chosen question does not tell us who we are. It does not uncover a hidden, fully formed self waiting patiently beneath the surface. Instead, it offers a temporary structure within which different aspects of our lives can come into focus. Experiences that once felt disconnected may begin to speak to one another. A painful memory may acquire a significance it did not previously have. A future that once seemed unimaginable may become thinkable. By limiting the field of attention, the question gives a particular memory, relationship, feeling, or possibility enough space to be examined closely. The constraint is temporary; what becomes visible within it can continue to shape how a person understands what has already been lived and what might still be possible.

The conditions that shape a life remain part of it. Therapy can offer forms within which clients encounter those conditions from a different standpoint and consider how they might respond. A villanelle becomes expressive through its structure, as each returning line gathers significance from what has unfolded around it. Therapy can work in much the same way. A thoughtfully chosen constraint can change the meaning of what we return to, opening possibilities for the persons we are still able to become.

Books to Explore

·       Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (1981). Harper Perennial.

·       Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). Citadel Press.

·       Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006). Harvard University Press.

·       Jonathan Kaag, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (2018). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

·       Russ Harris, The Happiness Trap (2007; 2nd ed. 2022). Shambhala Publications.