A lot of people and clients often ask me what psychotherapy can bring them. It feels to me that the prevailing opinion in our society is that attempting to “heal your soul” is nonsense. That this is not a necessity for life.
The conviction that when somebody asks a psychologist or therapist for help, it means they are not able to help themselves. These kinds of statements hurt me.
But were we ever taught how to deal with our emotions?
Whether in school or at home, were we shown how to work with our thoughts? How our body and mind is connected?
How to work with our feelings so that we could stay in our authenticity, feeling body fully and living our truth?
I am a proponent of the fact that it is not possible to be an expert on each and every topic in life but that we are able to learn about almost everything. But it is good to start with ourselves.
That is why I wish everybody knew who to contact if they fancied starting to live their truthful selves. In a way that would allow to feel their body, emotions fully and live their life according this connection.
However one might not know yet how to embark on this journey. One might be in a stifling situation, convinced that it is mandatory to go through ordeals alone or feeling difficulties to ask for help.
That is the reason I wanted to write the following lines.
We are the best experts on our own lives.
Indeed, we are the most qualified persons to know about ourselves.
But unfortunately mental and emotional patterns have been imprinted so deeply inside of us that we do not notice them anymore.
Patterns that make us suppress and hold in feelings in our unconscious. So therapists and psychologists are here to accompany people on the path to learn how to unlock them and get them back to the conscious, to mature a “whole” personality, more satisfied and happier.
If the psychotherapist is able to be good mirror for you, helps you to see your true self in it. Can reflect you and help you uncover the authentic self and heal emotional pain.
That is the purpose of self-growth and often the focus of work with a therapist or a psychologist.
Therapist, thanks to the fact that is educated trained and went through a lot of years of self therapy and healing, can help you to deal with these matters. He or she is able to listen to you on different levels and reflect them back to you.
So then your unique story can be looked at from different points of view. You can access your body wisdom and stored memories, which you can heal.
And you will be able to access your healing power in safety of the relationship that will be established between you and the therapist.
During the process will better appreciation of your coping mechanisms and adaptation ocure. At once you might gain self compassion and understanding of those savers from your early years of life.
You gain different perspectives on your sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious believes ruling your life.
Together with the therapist you can “rewire your automatic reactions” by gaining understanding of them. You will learn a lot of ,,aha” / cognitive understanding but as well a lot of ,,aah”/ emotional moments which your body will release.
All that will help you to feel more freedom in life. So your body for example will not have to manifest some suppressed emotions through manifestation of symptoms or illnesses.
Thanks to that you will be more conscious and present in your life and relationships and could live more as you wish.
Therapy is about dialog. A dialog during which the therapist really listens to the client, and acts as a mirror. So this way you can find the best way or the solution to any given situation and you can experience the “aha” moment of new way to approach it.
Everything can be changed, including our minds and emotional patterns.
But before changing, one needs to gain awareness of what to change.
The therapist is here to assist you in gaining awareness. By helping people to realize and grasp their own feelings, to find out and to see connections between events, the therapist facilitates this realization, the accomplishment of living a more conscious life.
So you become as much as possible in accordance with who you really are. Because we during life put around this ,,true self” many layers to protect us from pain so we forget how the ,,truth” in our body feels.
The whole therapy process is aiming at having the client realize that all the wisdom is lying deep inside of him. Therapy might be compared to finding the key to one’s inner treasure. According to me, this is the most important thing.
When the client concludes the therapy, he or she is leaving with his own gold key in the pocket and knows that he or she is solely but fully responsible for his or her life and knows how to get to this treasure.
Sometimes we might get afraid of this treasure and we do not know what to do with it. And that is why the therapist is there to help keeping focused on the things that we want to.
The relationship between the client and the therapist
The relationship in the therapeutic process plays a key role. Respect and safety allow being more open. Coming to the therapy to know more about ourselves, it is necessary to be honest towards ourselves and the therapist.
It is important that we feel that we really can say what is going on in our body and mind.
But as well be aware it is your process, you are the one who can always say ,,It is too much for me” or ,,I do not want to feel into this now”.
A psychotherapist is trained to reflect what you are coming with and is interested in each client, has an interest to help him. But this is not about making friendship.
This relationship is really close, but has clearly defined boundaries and surely remains professional. It is important that your therapist is sympathetic to you, resonates with you as a person.
That you feel comfortable during the therapeutic process and that you can relax. Thanks to that through communication during therapy, you will be able to hear yourself, your soul.
In what is therapy concretely helping us? What is the result?
When deciding to go for therapy, it is good to be aware that this is usually a longer term process. It is a total and longer lasting process of personality change and not simply what can be reached after one session or very short term counseling / therapy (nonetheless in some cases short term therapy is to be privileged).
If a person is coming with a trauma, starting the healing process can mean to touch the wound. But we are triggered in our life unconsciously because our close people do touch this wound so it might be more convenient for us to consciously look at it and heal it.
You will acknowledge deeper levels of yourself, you will go even through some emotional pain, because truth might hurt sometimes, but all this will bring you closer to yourself.
Those deeper levels were often hidden in unconscious or showing up as symptoms in our bodies.
We had to adapt to our life conditions in childhood so our identity is really based on adaptation.
In psychotherapy, we can step by step recognize back who we are. Coming back to the energy of openness we were born with.
It is important to keep in contact with your therapist which is most importantly your mirror, somebody who always supports you in connection with you.
But ideally you learn in psychotherapy to gain this connection to yourself.
Together in psychotherapy you are finding out your limiting beliefs, recognizing your coping strategies and life patterns.
The goal of therapy is not to retraumatize people but let them gain their power back which they often had to give up in process of life to be loved.
Your therapist supports you in this process of becoming authentic yourself.
Therapists help you to experience feelings, make them more visible, to concede them, to acknowledge them.
(Because when we are facing this problem alone, we often tend to ask ourselves if our feelings are adequate, if we can feel what we feel, if we are not just simply being deluded, we can feel confused whether we remember things right and etc.)
Therapy is helping us to discover our own emotions, our patterns. But as well to find out, what are we bringing into our relationships, and how we relate to ourselves.
It is showing us the way to our truth. So then we can the best way realize ourselves in the world. We realize how to be truly “alive”: a playful and loving person.
This process enhances one’s self-confidence; we know more about and appreciate more ourselves. So that at the end of the therapy we can feel the power, that we actually are responsible for our life and fully managing it.
Therapy is a place where we feel acceptance, where we feel good and can be fully ourselves and so discovering our inside.
A place where we can process our emotions, but especially where we gain understanding and acceptance of them.
So this way “older wounds”, emotional traumas get healed. And a cleaning is established. The person is changed, can feel more integrated, fulfilled, decisive and matured. At once he or she learns to hear for good and listens to him or herself.
Therapy is leading us towards acceptance of the circumstances and self-acceptance of our emotions. It is teaching us how to live more consciously, fully aware and how to create our way towards happiness on the base of the knowledge of ourselves.
Without accepting the situation we would not have the “freedom” of moving forward in life. Suppressed emotions always manifest somewhere else, where we do not expect nor want them.
The real inner changes need time, those are not happening fast. Quickly we can know, which steps are necessary to take, but it is a huge difference between knowing the way and going on this way and experiencing it. And therapy is about this process.
