Forward Motion
Understanding his past has helped superstar rapper Common to better navigate his future. Here’s what going to therapy taught him
My path to therapy started with a broken heart. I was so sad, so hurt, just floating through life, unable to be truly present because I was struggling to understand that life had changed and shifted.
I talked with my acting coach about what I was feeling and she introduced me to Susan Shilling, a psychotherapist who counsels artists and creative people.
Susan asks a lot of questions about what my life has been like, what I’ve experienced, about the parts that I feel have worked really well for me and the parts that have not worked so well.
We talked about what therapy can give to a person. ‘As human beings, we have storylines of things that have happened to us, and those experiences have shaped how we see things,’ she said.
‘Within all of us, there’s an underground river that has all of the information. It’s the primordial soup of when we came into consciousness.’ Through therapy, we can get to know what’s underneath.
By examining my consciousness,
I can work to keep my old experiences from creating a story in the present that isn’t actually present and alive within a current relationship.
That’s one of the fundamental benefits of therapy: you can get to know more about why you do what you do. You can see how your perceptions were shaped, and you can get tools to do something different. ‘If you have the will and the interest to do that work,’ said Susan, ‘there are gains that make you want to do more work. That’s how we move as human beings.’ With a clearer perception, you can begin to make different choices instead of compulsively doing the same thing again and again, which just gets you to the same place over and over.
‘A lot of us go through life trying to redecorate the house without working at the foundation of it,’ is how she explained it. ‘We’ll put in new carpets, we’ll paint, we’ll put in new wallpaper, but when you start to go down deep, and go to the deeper level of the foundations, you might see that there’s rotting or black mould or something that really needs some work, and we become afraid. That’s normal.
‘We become afraid that deep down inside, there are things that we’ve done that we feel bad about, that we have blocked and not dealt with, and we hold ourselves accountable in a way that’s not helpful. To have empathy, forgiveness, compassion for yourself, you have to know what you’re carrying around and what your house is built on. From there, once you start to feel that compassion, you can reach your inner child who’s been trapped and traumatised. That’s part of the therapeutic process. It takes someone very brave to want to go digging.’
My experiences with therapy have helped me piece together the parts of my story from the past that were clouding my judgment in the present time. In my memoir, Let Love Have The Last Word,
I wrote about my experience being molested as a child by an older boy who I considered to be a friend. He was someone who I trusted, who my family trusted. I didn’t understand what had happened, and I didn’t process it at the time. I just knew that it didn’t feel right to me and that a person I loved had done something to me that was a violation. I dealt with it by pushing it deep down inside of me. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t share it with my mother. I took it with me on my emotional journey, and
I never examined how it might be affecting me until I went to therapy.
Now I have more insight into my own patterning, and I can pause in a confusing moment in a relationship situation and think to myself, ‘Is what I’m feeling really about me and this person? Or is it me dealing with old stuff and projecting it?’
Another aspect of my pain that has been revealed to me comes from my family relationships. Deep within me, my young self exists – a little Rashid who felt abandoned by his father. This hurt remained as pain and insecurity; this young part of me needed to be reassured and cared for and heard. What therapy taught me was that I needed to tend to and care for that young version of myself so that his fears wouldn’t continue to define me as an adult.
My relationship with my father was part of it. So is my relationship with my mother. The most love I have ever received was from my mother. It was just the two of us, and sometimes my grandmother. The mother-son connection is already something.
When you’ve got a single mum, and it’s just you, you’re everything to each other. They work, they sacrifice and they give you what you are, and you feel that love strongly. When someone else enters that family picture, it’s a big shift.
I was eight years old when my mother remarried, and I had so many feelings
‘One of the benefits of therapy is you can get to know more about why you do what you do’
around it. But I was too young to fully understand and process what it meant to me and what it meant for me. My lingering emotions from that era showed up later in my life as insecurities because of the discomfort I experienced back then. I wasn’t able to communicate my feelings, and neither of us had the awareness to talk about it openly. No one sat me down to explain that I could never be replaced, that even though there would be another person in our home, I would always be her son. It was only through therapy that I was able to identify that some of my insecurities were rooted in this life event.
Because I wasn’t living with my father, I was able to imagine him as a superhero. I didn’t spend that much time with him, so who he was to me was an invention of my own imagination and desire. Susan’s work with me in this regard has been so enlightening and life-changing because I can see that I’m a work in progress, and I can identify more readily when I’m bringing what eight-year-old Rashid felt to my adult relationships.
That’s something I couldn’t get from sharing my feelings with my friends, with my aunt, with my cousin. I needed the perspective of a professional who had a balanced, insightful view and could share what they saw from the outside looking in.
Susan helps me get to that place of telling myself that I’m deserving, that I’m worthy, that I have a part of me that needs to be nurtured and treated with love and let out into the light.
As I’ve learned, if you don’t take the time to acknowledge, you’re not only living with it, you’re still living in it.
Now I can acknowledge what happened, how I reacted, what I pushed down deep inside me and how I’ve been shaped by all of that. Because I’ve had a chance to explore my own darkness with the support of a professional, I have the tools to step back and consider my situations with clearer eyes, which helps me step out of the darkness into the light.
If there’s anything you need to process, therapy can help you get to know yourself and express yourself more openly. It’s like opening a window in a closed-up room and letting the sun and the breeze wash through.