If you’re reading this post, you must be therapy-curious but hesitant or perhaps you’ve had a bad experience and felt that it “didn’t work”.This could be for a number of reasons but I’d like to explain what therapy is and isn’t.
- It’s a conversation between two intelligent people, where one needs help with their emotions or mental wellbeing (client) and another that deeply listens (therapist).
- The therapist has a respectful belief that the client can think and communicate clearly, can find ways of creating wellbeing and can achieve desired goals; the task therefore is to be on the same page about this.
- And if you gel with your therapist, it’s only a question of time when the change is going to happen based on your growing self-awareness, curiosity and commitment to a better life-style.
Whatever your issue may be: insomnia, anxiety, addiction to something or someone, overworking, depression, body perception issues, agoraphobia, domestic violence, fight, flight, freeze or fawn in conflicts, co-dependency, etc., be sure that it’s “sitting” on some kind of limiting belief or emotional wounding from the past. Most likely, you keep on reinforcing this wounding with your behaviours and overthinking.
The above may feel unpleasant to read, however, there’s gold in that. Firstly, you had to learn to be creatively adapted to survive in the environment in your childhood (it’s not your fault). Secondly, you’re not that dependent child anymore, so you can unlearn those behaviours and do better for yourself (it’s up to you).
A therapist is not going to rescue you from heavy and overwhelming feelings, but they can help you develop tactics on how to deal with them, think of it as learning how to fish.
When you finally start therapy, you make the first steps to own your challenge. Maybe you still blame yourself, partner or parents for what happened to you, however, you’re already with your new therapist, starting to solve your puzzle.
Conversation after conversation, because your therapist deeply listens to you and curiously inquires to garner more details, as well as offers some practical tools (a harpoon, a net, different bait, etc.), you understand your problem better. And the more you understand your problem, the more you see the options you have.
To name a few, options can be:
- naming your limiting belief about yourself
- sending that email
- listening without judgement to your partner
- spelling your needs or your true feelings out to your partner for the first time
- booking the follow up therapy appointment and attending it
- deciding to be honest with someone or in your therapy
- deleting that app
- admitting that you have a sugar addiction
- learning to contain your feelings rather than acting out
- realising and eventually accepting that your mum doesn’t want to repair relationship with you in the manner you do
- allowing yourself to be seen crying, the list goes on..
The more you unpick, process and eventually accept, the more resilient you become and the more you become able to regain your vitality, lucidity and inner freedom (the more fish you have and can even freeze it for later).
