Imagine safety, new skills and care together.
Choosing a therapist can stymie the most pro-active person. Some of it has to do with skill and degrees and knowledge and that can be known from websites and directories. More important is fit. You are looking for a guide to inner terrain you’ve not explored. You are not looking for a map although that might comfort at first. You aren’t looking for someone who knows the way. You are looking for someone to help you discern your way, your terrain. It’s a strange combination of knowing and not knowing. Knowing how to find out without having an opinion about where you will land. It is after all, your life.
It helps if the person has guided many different kinds of people. It also helps if the therapist has had their own thorough treatment so that she knows what she knows and what she doesn’t. A good therapist has the right questions, but the answers are yours. Analysts believe that there are parts of us that are unknown to us and that some of those parts rise to power inside. Exploring those parts in an atmosphere of acceptance and gentle attention will yield more clarity in decision making and less emotional chaos. You will have a sense of why you are upset.
Why does it help to talk about something? Well, words are a tiny bit magical. So much of human experience is not worded. When we can sit with the big, dumb feeling with a witness who is generous with what she sees and feels, what words may come into her mind, we can know a little more.
Oftentimes in anger and rage treatment we come upon trauma. I define trauma as something that was too much for the nervous system to handle. It could not be filed away and remembered like most things because it came apart into bits. That’s where the crazy fragmented feeling comes from. Our job is then to gather the bits all the while paying attention to your level of upset so that it doesn’t get to be too much again again. A mind that has experienced this fragmenting sometimes doesn’t trust itself. Our goal will be to reinstate that.
Sometimes the reason you hesitate to hire a therapist is because you fear the coming apart without knowing that there can be a coming back together.
