Psychoanalysis
Restless Legs and an Unquiet Mind
Personal Perspective: Deciphering what my restless legs were telling me.
Posted April 10, 2025 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- Restless leg syndrome, treated neurologically, might well be psychosomatic.
- My restless leg episodes created a pattern with obvious meaning I needed to understand.
- When my psychoanalyst was away, my restless leg episodes turned volcanic.
- Eventually, I could feel through my jolting legs the need we all have for comfort, closeness, and dependency.
When it began, in my twenties, a year or two into my first marriage and teaching job, I had no name for it. It was a kind of fit around bedtime. My calf muscles would tighten as if some malign giant was pinching them between his mighty fingers. Something like electrical jolts would shoot through my lower legs, making me leap out of bed to stamp my feet until the voltage lowered.
I paid no attention. Most people had some inexplicable ailment: migraines, weight problems. This one wasn’t bad. Anyway, if I could function, I was fine, and function I did.
It would be a decade before a New York Times article identified “restless leg syndrome” for me, though it included no explanation or cure. Doctors treated it with dopamine-promoting drugs, but I didn’t want medication that would mess with my brain. Except for RLS, I liked my brain the way it was. To calm my restless nights, I took Ambien.
Fast forward three Ambien-infused decades that suppressed my RLS. I’d started psychoanalysis because I realized that although I had found my way to the right marriage and agreat teaching job, as well as a home surrounded by mountains I can hike to my heart’s content, I couldn’t fully enjoy my life because of anxieties that popped up without reason and depressions that could pull me down with every disappointment and difficulty.
This was a “relational” psychoanalysis, which didn’t leave me any room to intellectualize my problems or my past. I had to feel them, which I did as my analyst and I explored how my whole emotional history was contained in the relationship I had formed with her, a fraught one. As much as I liked her, I kept my distance, thinking of her as someone I paid for her particular skill set, not as “an object of care,” as she put it. I was wary of her, as I was of all people. However, the caring attention she trained on me in those first two years melted my distancing defenses. Some unknown part of me was thrilled that a benevolent authority figure was finally taking some responsibility for what had gone wrong in my early years.
I finally faced how much she meant to me after I crashed my car just as I neared her office. Flustered and shaking, I went to her door to cancel the session, letting her know I’d be sitting on the curb waiting for the tow truck. What came next floored me. She clapped me in her arms and asked, “Is it alright if I come sit with you on the curb”? I nodded, stunned, and there we were, sitting on the curb for the next half hour, me, distraught, her murmuring comforting words in my ear. I was so rattled that I took every bit of care she offered, feeling embarrassed, childish, even ashamed of how much I wanted it.
As months turned into years and we explored my resistance to our loving connection, I discovered what difficulties attachments involved for me. Except with my husband, being vulnerable and open with someone always felt dangerous. As my mother’s daughter, I’d learned to keep my distance and “never depend on anyone.”
No surprise, then, that my RLS roared back when I gave up Ambien in a quest to know what I was hiding from myself by taking it. The closer I got to my analyst, the worse my restless legs became. As independent as I thought I was when I started analysis, now even a weekend’s separation from her was painful. My restless legs were spasmodic, seizures that shook and twisted me. Nothing helped—not bicycling my legs in the air or stomping them, flamenco-style, against the floor.
Then something strange happened. In the middle of one tumultuous night, I emailed my analyst to describe how my legs were jerking and twitching in a mad St. Vitas Dance. I was mortified to tell her about this preposterous ailment. However, when I pressed “send,” the frantic twitch of my legs stopped. If ever there was proof that my restless legs were psychosomatic, the sudden and dramatic relief after writing to my analyst, which I’d never done before, was it.
Even more amazing to me was her response. I feared I’d overstepped in emailing her. But in the morning, she wrote, “I’m so glad that you’re willing to trust me with your restless legs. Write me ten times in the night if that’s what it takes for you to rest.” When I became defensively distant again, she persisted, saying, “Can you let yourself experience a safe surrender to the ministrations of another human being?”
I wasn’t sure I could. But my restless legs insisted, and so, over the next months and years, I learned how to trust her, despite inevitable disappointments and difficulties. As I did, it got easier to be intimate with friends. By the conclusion of analysis, I had deciphered what my restless legs were telling me. I could feel through my jolting legs the need we all have for comfort, closeness, and dependency.
Now, post-analysis, when I feel an RLS episode begin, I take myself for a walk, even in the middle of a starry night. My legs quiet as I feel the presence of all the people I’m connected to, and parts of myself I’d previously banished. In those moments, I’m almost grateful to my restless legs.
