The purpose of these notes is to give my clients and others who may be interested in seeking psychotherapy some idea of what therapy is about.
I will try to describe the therapy process by exploring the four pillars that form the essential therapy structure. This is a template to follow as an outline to guid us through the therapeutic process. The four pillarsare: Becoming more Selfish. Resolving the ambivalence. Getting permission and Rehearsal and practice of new behaviors.
Therapy helps clients take care of themselves. Firstly by getting them in touch with their needs and secondly, by teaching them to verbalize their needs to others. Being more selfish is very conflictive for people because they have grown up believing that being selfish is against the moral values of society.
Being more selfish means that one learns how to take care of their bodies and emotions. It is about living a balanced lifestyle. “Self care” is an important skill that is emphasized in therapy. These skills include improving one’s diet, cessation of intake of toxic chemicals (alcohol, opioids, marijuana, nicotine), regular exercise, social interaction, “pro-social behaviors”, good use of leisure time, etc.
When we are focused on our needs, we are able to live healthy and take good care of ourselves. When being “ego-centric” we are more interested in what others think of us. We try to make a good impression on others. We are more interested in what others value rather than our own.
Being selfish also means having a positive relationship with oneself. It is about knowing oneself, to know our strengths and our weaknesses. It involves reflecting on the meaning of one’s life. It requires that we spend time on a daily basis in solitude, reflecting on the meaning of our life.
Being more selfish involves expanding what we consider are the parts of our self. We should include our community, the air we breath, the natural environment and the wellbeing of others as part of ourselves. To not include what makes us live is against our own nature.
Therapy makes us aware of our emotional and psychological needs such as belonging, self esteem and self actualization. If these needs are not met, we are not going to feel truly happy. In order to have these needs met, we need to first recognize that we have them. Then we need to name them and be able to create an environment that can fulfillour needs.
Our family our learning ground,It’s where we learn what our needs are and learn to feel worthy when we have them met. If we learn to feel unwanted or unworthy to deserve good things for ourselves, then we are not going to be able to create a world that makes us feel fulfilled.
An important aspect of becoming selfish is having Self-acceptance and Self-compassion. Often people who come to therapy find themselves struggling to feel good about themselves and don’t feel worthy. They are full of self loathing.
Another way therapy helps people to strengthen their self concept is by working on sub-personalities. These are parts of ourselves that get disowned or split off due to inner conflicts. In therapy, we work to recognize them and to accept them as they are and to reintegrate them to the personality in a positive way.
A person tends to identify with their ego or persona rather than their “true self”. As they journey deeper into themselves, they are able to discover facets about themselves that hold more meaning and purpose than superficial qualities that are fed by the media in an effort to make us better consumers. Being selfish means making contact with a deeper Self that can be called the “authentic” self. We can say this is a spiritual dimension our personality.
A teacher and friend told me many years ago that the essence of therapy was to help people resolve their “Ambivalences”. The meaning of ambivalence according to the Webster’s dictionary is “ mixed feelings or emotions”. To me it means to have two opposite feelings or thoughts about the same thing.
When we have conflicts or trauma, in order to cope with them, we split our self to withstand the emotional shock. We are conscious of one part and we push the other part out of our awareness. The repressed part we identify as the unconscious mind. The unconscious is not a physical location as a body organ or limb, such as the right lung or the left arm. It is a condition of athought or an emotion. This means that the emotions exist even if we are not aware of them, like a sound that is below our range of hearing it.
Going through life fractured can be a very frustrating and an ineffective way to live. Therefore, in therapy, our task is to unify or integrate the personality by bringing together these various parts into harmony. The therapist must identify the emotions and or ideas that the client has the most ambivalences towards.
By exploring these inner conflicts and resolving them, we are able to remove the major blocks that can impede growth. This is done by engaging in a dialogue between the different parts of the personality. This acceptance of the feelings or ideas that have been in conflict, can result in a liberating feeling.
Inner conflicts create a lot of stress and impede oneself from moving forward in life. It can create physical and emotions illnesses. When the body feels these opposite emotions and thoughts that are creating our conflicts it represses them, creating a lot of tension. In order to overcome this tension, the person needs to express emotions that are in conflict with one another.
Pushing emotions and thoughts away from awareness takes energy. This robs the conscious mind of energy to deal with the demands of daily living. The body also feels the effects of this repression and becomes tense and develops an armor to push down those unwanted emotions or thoughts. This repression can manifest as physical or illnesses, such chronic pain, depression, drug abuse, etc.
Getting permission:
The third pillar of therapy is called: “Getting Permission”. This is vary powerful process for the client because it facilitates the movement from being stuck in a bad place to moving into growth and evolution. An important aspect of this process is having permission to break from your assigned spot and venture out of your comfort zone and find your way to your goals and self realization.
One way people keep themselves stuck is by numbing their emotions. By getting permission to feel again, people can overcome some of the mental blocks that keeps them from growing. Having access to our emotions is an important resource for personal change.
Often, clients come to therapy when they are contemplating a big change in their life. It could be getting divorced, taking a new job or career, moving to a new city, etc.. By speaking with a counselor, the client is able to explore their values, goals, purpose, meaning, etc.. They can see what conflicts exists between their values and desires. Once a person has clarified for themselves, their goals and values, they can make better choices. Therapy can serve to strengthen the sense of purpose in the client. When they can hear themselves verbalizing their dreams, it make the person clarity about what is that they want.
The counseling process empowers the client by increasing the ability to make positive choices, increasing his confidence to move in a direction that is aligned with his life’s purpose. At this point, he is able to overcome his doubts about the choices facing him.
All societies have rites of passage rituals, with the purpose of giving new members “permission” to enter new stages of life. In modern society, many of these rituals have been lost or are lacking in meaning and significance. Psychotherapy offers people an opportunity to have a ritual for these “new beginnings”. The therapist validating the emotions the client that motivate him towards a new endeavors.
Once it has been determined that the client is ready to move on in his life, the therapist can act as a mentor or coach, giving the client added confidence and helping him move on his journey.
If we are defined by our limitations and restrictions that we put around ourselves, than therapy works at helping people challenge those limitations by helping removing those blocks. This is what I call “permission”, the allowing of one self to grow and thrive.
Rehearsal and practice:
As we dream about what our lives should be, we need to create a plan on how to manifest those dreams into reality. This process is called “grounding”. It means implementing our wishes in the “real world”. This is an area where people with big dreams can sound very flaky because they are not sounding realistic. We often call people with big dreams but unable to carry them out, “space cadets”. This implies that their feet are not well planted on the ground. Yet, if we don’t have dreams, our lives tend to get stale and we feel unfulfilled. So a balance between our dreams and keeping our feet on the ground is what is necessary. Therapy is very helpful for people trying to “keep it real”.
As the client and therapist strategize on a plan of action for what the solution to a particular problem is going to be, the therapist’s main task is to keep the client in touch with reality. This means that the plan of action has to be realistic and within client’s reach. The final phase of the treatment is helping the client rehearse behaviors that will can be implemented, in order to facilitate a desired change.
The process of fully living is to manifest our selves to the world. We can not live in a world of only ideas, fantasies and wishes. We must act with belief and conviction. Therefore, the real outcome of therapy is seen in how our behaviors have been a able to change. An example, some one is less aggressive, a better listener, more empathetic, etc. Our actions must reflect our beliefs and our values. So before we act, we have to check that there is an alignment between our values and our behaviors.
The quality of our psychological life is measured by the integrity of our actions. Most of the actions are about how we behave towards others and also how we behave towards our own self. It is hard to understand why so many people engage in self-destructive behaviors such as drug use, overeating, sex, etc. Behavior has to follow thought, therefore we must think before we act.
A therapist tries to get client to switch from self destructive behaviors to one that foster the health and wellness of the client and his or her community. This is what has been called call “Pro-Social Behaviors or Practices”.
The client is asked to create an image of an “Ideal Model”, this is a visual representation of the qualities they would like to have in their personality. He then can use this image as a map to follow, in order to create the desired change in their life.
The therapist can also serve as a model for the client to see someone act in a grounded and compassionate way. The hope is that the client will internalize a more compassionate attitude towards oneself.
One major aspect of therapy is about learning new ways to communicate and to sooth ourselves and others. The therapist can be a teacher of new ways of being. This takes practice as new behaviors have to be internalized. Without practice all the solutions developed while in therapy, our just ideas that will live only in our heads. This act of self acceptance is practiced at each therapy visit. He can also internalize therapist behaviors that will than be used to heal inner conflicts. Some of these behaviors are compassion, listening, focus, accepting things as they are.
The therapy session becomes a lab for new behaviors to be discovered and explored. As we try to bring them to reality, we need a space to rehears them in order to refine them. This is why I say, “therapy is rehearsal for real life”.