Some people experience coercive control: patterns of behaviour by another person that deprive us of our independence and make us feel isolated or scared. The creative arts can help us understand this experience, and perhaps, in time, move on from it.

The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilkecrafted his poem The Panther in 1902, after visiting the zoo at Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

In it, he offers us a striking image of the caged weariness of controlled existence, with powerful emotions and memories, unconsolable torment briefly experienced and then – at great cost – rigorously suppressed.  

Here is Stephen Mitchell’s translation:

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

 Click here to listen to Jordan Harling reading the poem  

My patient Ben is a successful solicitor and father of three grown-up children. However, his life is no longer what he wishes it to be. Over the years, without knowing how or why, everything at home has become managed by his wife.  He tells me he has no control over how his income is spent. His wife insists they save as much as possible for a rainy day. He would love to eat out from time to time, and buy himself a good set of clothes, but she insists that it is more economical to eat at home and that he makes do with outfits from charity shops. And anyway, she reminds him that he isn’t getting any younger, and that he needs her to look after him.

Ben goes on solo walking holidays from time to time, and has fleeting, tantalising glimpses of alternative realities. But he returns home with a sense of gloomy inevitability. He feels an affinity with Rilke’s panther, and his paralysed mighty will. When he’s on his own he often plays Randy Crawford’s One Day I’ll Fly Away, longing to be free of his emotional bondage.