Not Getting Stuck in Therapy
In its early stages therapy often involves understanding how the “I” that exists came to be. It’s looking at our family system, our innate tendencies and characteristics and seeking to understand “why” these things are the way that they are. Fundamental to this stage is telling a story about ourselves. It's “I am this way because of my parents, my upbringing, my religion, my belief system, my gender, my sexuality, my culture, etc…” It’s a narrative, it’s reason, it’s cause and effect. In this stage we gain insight on how we became who we are. We develop a story of ourselves that becomes conscious for the first time or that is at least more conscious and more true than previous iterations.
In this stage we can become defensive. Sometimes necessarily so! If you’ve lived a lifetime with little or no boundaries for instance learning your own power to let others in or keep them out can feel like all out war. We have to defend our newfound understanding because we fear that having it damaged might put us right back in that cage we grew up in. This is a legitimate fear. But living in fear not freedom. This is part of the process but we don’t want to get stuck here.
We want to go to the next step of the therapeutic journey which is taking our new found understanding of ourselves and our newfound skills for navigating difficult emotions and step back into risk and vulnerability. Now this can be really scary! It’s where we allow our newfound understanding to be challenged. Part two of the psychological journey is becoming comfortable with growth and change and a fluid understanding of ourselves that continues growing and changing. This is learning to be free of rigid thinking and over identification with the still very important story that helps us understand ourselves. It’s learning to discover ourselves and others over and over again. It’s not living in fear of a cage it’s life where no cage exists.
What’s more, this is often the stage where we start to have moments of not just understanding our pain but actually healing it by lovingly re engaging the parts of ourselves that are wounded and broken and learning that we have the strength, intuition, and intelligence to risk re-experiencing these parts of our lives in a way that heals them. At this point we are truly becoming free.
