Sweeping Away The Trash Thoughts Of A Psychotherapist. From New Year's

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Why, in general, is all this pre-New Year fuss? Summing up, endless plans for next year? You can not get involved in the pre-holiday bustle, not buy gifts, show Santa Claus (or Santa Claus) a fig in your pocket, but the year will end anyway. Another year. Relentlessly, like day and night, inhalation and exhalation, birth and death

And we intuitively strive to rake the leaves into a heap - to turn our experience that we have experienced over the past year into something useful, or at least to recognize it. Say to yourself, "It happened. And this happened too. With me. This is important because it is a part of my life that helps me grow." Vietnamese Zen master and poet Tik Nat Khan used to say "When you look at a beautiful rose, you can see withered petals and the mud that it turns into. And when you look at the mud, you can see the rose that grows out of them."

Well, he is a Zen master and he is a poet in order to speak beautifully, but in essence, our experience is really a compost, thanks to which we grow further. In many ways, the process of raking leaves is what happens in psychotherapy - awareness, recognition and assimilation of experience. Therefore, summing up the results of the outgoing year, with all the wonderful and terrible things that happened to us, can be very healing for us. And you can remember what we are now throwing into our compost pit to grow what you want. What are we saying goodbye to?

With old fears

Remember, maybe this year you finally did something that you did not dare to do for many years. Suddenly, you suddenly appeared in public - at a conference, at a meeting, at a wedding of friends, anywhere - although you were always terribly afraid to speak in public. Or they sewed a rag cat, in spite of the fact that your "arms are growing from … the lower back." Or they told your wife that you don't like it when she tickles you with cold heels, and she didn't even file for divorce. Or they wrote and published a book and read it … But you never know. If you remember, it may turn out that in the past year you said goodbye to some of your old fears and did not even notice. Please note.

With old scars

Each of us is full of old scars. These can be big and small grievances, hard partings not lived up to the end, painful injuries. Most of us have had to meet the blows of fate or just bang on its sharp corners. Those whom fate has never hit, step back, this is not about you.

Many scars have long been embellishments (the very mud that rose from), but some we still regularly comb, like Honduras. Could it be that this year you stopped rearing some of the old wounds? Because it let go. It took and left. You even forgot that this place should hurt. No not like this. You listen on purpose, but it doesn't hurt. And it turns out that you can breathe deeply, as if the ribs have already grown together after a fracture, and you have not noticed. Scroll through your "scars", maybe another one has released?

With frog skin

Sometimes it turns out that you are just ready to move on. There are things that you WANT to say goodbye to and travel to new worlds. You want to say goodbye to them not necessarily because it was bad, painful or not very beautiful with them. You just grew out of them, they have already done their job, or they no longer "work". Maybe the "workaholic-perfectionist" has already achieved everything he could and can be sent on a long-term vacation, giving scope to the creative bully. The most caring-in-the-mother-mother suddenly felt that she could breathe a little and remember that she didn’t need more… no - she could relax her continuous concern. Or the "great-of-all-bite" has already realized that it is not at all necessary to keep a perimeter defense, no one attacks him. Or maybe the girl in frills (tattered jeans) is tired of dreaming of distant countries and princes on white horses (bikers on black motorcycles), but she just wants to buy a plane ticket to take a chance and see how it really is.

At this moment, when you are ready, you with gratitude and pleasure leave in the past year the frog that allowed you to become a princess, a prince, a professor of mathematics or a parent of three wonderful children, and go further into the unknown. Only, please, more coastal with a frog.

For rituals of farewells and partings, popular articles often suggest various brutal methods - to burn, tear, bury and sing comic couplets at the grave. I think you have read about this more than once. But, actually, there are more peaceful ways.

For example, seeing off a well-deserved rest. There is something surprisingly human and soothing in not killing or burying your spent part of your personality, relationships, work, even some kind of difficult drama, but to spend it with honor on vacation. Write a couple of letters of thanks for many years of service, say "Thank you for everything you did for me, but I'm not you anymore", or "not there" or "not with you." Maybe even with love to choose and give yourself a memorable gift on this occasion.

What would you like to say goodbye to before you open the champagne?