2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Psychotherapy is emotionally, morally, mentally, financially and in all respects costly, but also painful, tragic, insipid and hopeless. I also forgot about mourning: any accomplishments, illusions, relationships, lost objects, meanings and landmarks, my own and others' limitations, the self-image, and other supporting structures.
In the process of saying goodbye to these beloved, reliable and stable things that have long been rotten and moldy, you become flexible and shapeless, you learn to shape yourself upon request and context, create temporary structures, and question everyone else, test and reflect, feel and analyze, rely partially and not always, make balanced and spontaneous choices, and know nothing for sure, except for what is with you now.
In rare moments of despair and regression, you want to ask at least for a while some template or stencil, advice or how to do it right, and then you think, still think, and you don't want to.
It is expected that here they will help to find a way out of the situation, but in practice they return to it or gently but steadily bring it down, and no matter what paths they lead, they lead to this meeting. This will happen faster, the more internal flexibility and strength, or more gentle and durable if less. Sometimes they ask awkward questions and suggest the same exercises. Sometimes they support, sometimes they annoy.
If you want freedom of choice, there is responsibility for it.
You want to escape into illusion, but return to reality.
Here they unfold this reality until aggression, despair, fear or nausea rises from it. Therapy begins with that very uncomfortable, terrible and exciting moment when you try to hide the nausea back, but it’s too late and it doesn’t come back.
You are nervous. You cry. Ashamed of the nausea. They help you to live it. It turns out that it is normal to live with it, and with it you are mentally healthy and normal. Then everything seems less scary, and the nausea can be admitted.
Then you walk with her and you realize that you are tired, uncomfortable, pressing and pressing. You understand that you can't live like that, and that life is small and, if you don't decide, then what is the point, and you need to do something, and do it yourself, and most importantly, do it now.
You make a choice.
You are experiencing temporary anxiety disorder from freedom of choice and authorship in your own life.
On this wave, you change something, act, make mistakes, do strange things, but this is all normal and the anxiety will write off, and the neurologist will write it out, if necessary.
One morning you wake up in a new world and scratch your frontal lobes wondering why I avoided this for so long.
The way out of the situation is not through avoidance, protection or detachment from the problem, but only through return and completion. To complete is to go from recognition to action, and to take responsibility for it - to realize the very freedom that everyone wants, but no one loves. Therefore, therapy is so costly in all cost categories.
It happens that the client comes with apathy and fatigue from the loss of strength to containment where the choice has long been awaiting and even realized. This is an incomprehensible responsibility at work, relationships without a future and other funnels, where life energy is spent not on changing the situation, but on maintaining the fear of changing it, guilt for one's actions or indecision, shame from inconsistency with how it should-should-be-if -was-it was, and into other black holes of psychic space.
And there is no way to change that by "boosting self-esteem," "energizing yourself," or anything from the entertainment industry other than the way it is known.
The search for pleasant alternatives betrays a desire to solve the problem without solving, to swim across and stay dry, and this formula shows that something is hidden or missing in it.
The therapy, by testing reality and discovering variables hidden by psychological defenses, expands the client's view to understanding the situation, realizing its capabilities and limitations in it, and this leads to making a choice: to swim and get wet or stay dry, but on the shore.
Those who ventured to swim after a while are pleased with themselves that they have overcome their big or small way. And it can be so pleasant that all these costs for all cost items, difficulties and grief on it seem to be smoothed out, difficult experiences in memory lighten, and after a while it all looks heroically beautiful. And you can even repeat it.
Psychotherapy teaches movement along this path: testing reality, experiencing feelings, realizing one's capabilities and limitations, reflection and the ability to withstand ignorance, setting values and priorities, the ability to change and the ability to accept as it is, and many more important things for life. And all these excellent skills and abilities will remain with the client until the last working day of the nervous system, so any costs for them are worth it.
Psychologist Mila Grebenyuk
+380 063 603 22 20
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