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Almost no one arrives at therapy saying «I’ve come to review my history». One arrives before that: through an anxiety crisis that gives no warning, an insomnia that has settled in, a sense of overload that no longer relents. Anguish knocks at the door —sometimes it breaks it down— and the first thing asked, quite rightly, is that it stop. Without taking any urgency away from that relief, I want to propose a second reading: anguish is not only a fault to be silenced. It is also a message.

The symptom is not the enemy

There is an understandable reflex: to treat the symptom as an intruder, something to switch off as soon as possible. And at times relief is necessary and even urgent —medical support, when appropriate, is a legitimate part of care. But if the work stops there, something is lost. For the symptom does not appear at random: it settles precisely where something presses. Anguish does not come to ruin a life; it comes to point to a place where life, as it was organized, ceased to hold.

Anguish as a compass

Unlike other affects, anguish does not always have a clear object. One does not fear something precise; one stands before an edge. That is why it disconcerts. But that very disconcertion is informative: anguish tends to ignite near a truth that presses to be said and has not yet found words. It marks the border of what has not been able to be thought. Read this way, it ceases to be mere torment and begins to work as a compass: it points, without yet naming it, toward what asks to be looked at.

Why it appears now

The moment is rarely accidental. The crisis tends to arrive at a threshold —a relationship that ends, a move, a new demand, an achievement that, instead of calming, unsettles. These are points where the same old script no longer suffices, and the body, which does not lie, announces it before the words do. «Now» is not a bad moment: it is the moment when something, at last, became impossible to keep ignoring.

To listen, not only to silence

The work, then, does not consist only in silencing the symptom —though relief matters and is welcome—, but in listening to what it names. It is a slow process without formulas: room is given to what anguish borders, one recognizes what it protects and what it prevents, and little by little what appeared as pure distress begins to be sayable. I do not promise that anguish will disappear completely or overnight; that would be dishonest. I promise, if anything, that it can cease to be a mute enemy and become something legible.

When anguish knocks at the door, the first thing is to understand that it did not come to destroy: it came to warn. And to attend to that warning —with time, with seriousness, without judgment— is what allows one to pass from suffering a symptom one does not understand, to inhabiting a life that, at last, begins to become one’s own.

Carlos Hernán Arango Botero — Psychologist