What is Therapy?
Therapy often traverses the baffling territory between what we ‘know’ about ourselves versus how we ‘feel’ and experience ourselves (and others). When we experience abuse, neglect, mis-attunement, racism, neurodivergence, codependency and traumatic events, we often form deep brain stem defenses designed to ensure our basic survival and protection. These defenses can become rigid and embedded, leaving us disconnected from ourselves and vulnerable to depression, isolation, anxiety and despair. A therapist can help you reconsider outdated reactionary patterns and initiate a renewed sense of choice, authorship and personal freedom.
We regularly update operating systems on our technological devices, but often drag defensive operational systems formed during childhood and difficult adult experiences across our lifespan.
Newcomers to the idea of therapy often assume that trauma refers to a single catastrophic event. In reality, trauma is often experienced as a glitch in the way our brain stores memories.
Traumatic memory is often blurry, adhesive and imprinted with fear. It can leave us stuck in a continuous bodily experience of hypervigilant overreaction and/or paralysis and collapse (or both). Re-visiting difficult experiences in therapy provides the chance to reconsider them in the clear light of your intelligence, strength and awareness.
Therapeutic theories describe this process in different types of language – re-claiming your true self, re-moving unconscious barriers, re-engaging the prefrontal cortex, re-authoring and revising your life, moving away from reaction and towards choice. Regardless of the language, the central message is the same - your problems don’t necessarily go away, but you can establish a strong connection to your inner resources and navigate problems with skill, choice and insight. The work is non-linear and often slower than we would like, but therapy should be accompanied by a sense of expansion, coherence and forward momentum.
Ongoing discoveries in neuroscience research confirm what therapists have always known - that a large percentage of healing and change in the therapy room occurs in the creative, relational and nonlinear right hemisphere of the brain. Although therapy is challenging work, it should also feel warm, playful and enlivening.
CRISTINA WAIT
Psychotherapy Services
