Into the darkness: A traveller’s guide Love is enough, in that it is all the opportunity you need. But it is not enough in that you will need to take action to avail yourself of its lessons. Psychotherapy is all about coming to understand, acknowledge and ultimately, feel the pain you experienced as a child, which you have repressed, and the repression of which has made you ill. People come to psychologists when the repression of their pain is causing problems in their lives – conflict, depression, anxiety. In the therapist’s chair you can find the compassionate holding you needed when you were small. It opens up the secret sore parts of yourself. And then you go back into your life, knowing, perhaps, that you were abandoned as a child, that it hurt you, that you sometimes react to your husband as though he were the father who left you. You would like your life to be better. What do you do? The adult love encounter is an encounter with the self, and the pain you feel is your resistance to meeting the wounded parts of yourself. How do you meet them when you are away from the comfort of the therapy room? Only you can heal yourself. Repeating the story of your abandonment to yourself, your partner and your friends is a mere crutch. What you need to do, when you feel pain, is to actively take steps to meet yourself. In this short article I want to introduce you to four basic life skills for navigating the waters of a love relationship. They are: - Awareness: Cultivating a watcher within you, who notices what you feel, think and do. This is an attitude of curiosity. It is a new habit.
- Acceptance: When you notice that you feel pain, you need to accept the pain, and not flee from it. Fleeing looks like this: Picking a fight, storming out of the room, throwing things, crying to get sympathy. Acceptance looks like this: Communicating to your significant other that you are in pain, and then going to a quiet place to look into it.
- Ownership: This means that you are ready to examine your own behaviour, and stop blaming others. To the extent that you stop ruminating about what other people have done wrong, or are doing to you, and begin to focus solely on what you are doing to continue to hurt yourself.
- Action: This is our belief that you have a choice about what you do, always. It means you choose to break old habits, and try new behaviours.
The result of such a programme is that change comes about in your life. You discover your freedom from the past, and in any current situation that you find yourself in. You discover your own power, self-sufficiency, and ability to love maturely. You are grounded in yourself and you know who you are. The premise behind this programme is, I repeat, that only you can heal yourself. If you are prepared to commit to yourself in this way, you will need a great deal of support, because changing old habits is very hard, and the fear is real. This is, to my mind, where a mentor, teacher or counsellor with experience in the field can assist you. I prefer to think about this as a school of learning about life, and yourself – not therapy. To me, therapy too often functions as a place where you look to someone else to give you something you never had. It is gratifying in the short term, and can lead to new insights, but not necessarily change. And ultimately, if you are in pain, change is all that matters. Dr Jana Lazarus is a clinical psychologist and Miranda Wannenburgh is a counsellor specialised in addiction, self-esteem and codependence. Together they run a creative, out-of-the-box consultancy for personal change in Cape Town. They can be reached on 021 788 5727 www.changematters.co.za
Read the original article Is love enough? by David van der Want |
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