Almost everyone looks for help to deal with stress, anxiety, depression or other emotional challenges at some stage in their life, whether this is through conversations with friends, books, online research or with the support of a professional therapist.
If you have reached out but found the help you have accessed is incomplete or feels wrong, it can make you feel that nothing will ever take away your emotional pain.
This is the TRUE PURPOSE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY:
To Respect, Value, Deepen and Enrich our experiences, our relationships and our lives.So why do we need Psychotherapy ?
Just as a high proportion of the causes of problems in the atmosphere lie beneath the surface, in the soil and under the sea, many and possibly most of the causes of our emotional and mental challenges, and the resources needed to heal them, lie beneath the surface of our consciousness.
I would like to suggest that there is no right way.
There are different ways, and each way has advantages and disadvantages.
Sometimes I use touch, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I work with clients who know each other, sometimes I don’t.
When I asked one of my supervisors, David Boadella, what contract he had with his clients, he answered “which client and when?”
So you’re feeling anxious or depressed. Or you don’t feel quite right but you find it hard to describe how you feel.
You know your life can be better but you don’t know how to get there. You may have already tried various approaches, perhaps even been to counsellors and psychotherapists but not been able to get the results you’re looking for.
ANXIETY, DEPRESSION AND SOMATIC PSYCHOTHERAPY
This is what my work in emotional learning – including somatic psychotherapy and counselling – is about. Restoring our capacity to give and receive love.
As a society, and indeed as a human race, we have moved so far away from our true nature, from what we know in our hearts – ie that our true nature is loving, cooperative and compassionate – that we we have come to believe that human nature is destructive.
Here is an interesting question. Does a person’s anxiety, depression or other distressing feeling indicate that they are mentally ill, or absolutely normal?
Different schools of thought will give you different answers. In core development terms, however, anxiety, depression and other signs of emotional distress often indicate that your sense of self is healthy enough to produce these symptoms of a deeper, often hidden emotional conflict.
When I was 18 years old, I was a good amateur table-tennis player. I never made it to a final, but I made it to a semifinal and a number of quarterfinals.
In the first round of a national competition I was drawn against a player who had one leg shorter than the other and consequently limped and was unable to move fast.
It’s good to remind ourselves not to see and relate to people – children and adults – through the filter of a label, however correct we may think the label is.
Some time ago I had the opportunity of working with a woman in her late 20s. She was diagnosed as chronically depressed, and stuck in a junior position in her company because they said she was a slow learner with poor communication skills and no good at working in a team.
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“EVERY TIME WE TEACH A CHILD SOMETHING, WE PREVENT HIM FROM INVENTING IT HIMSELF!” Jean Piaget
You may think that the most important skill of a somatic psychotherapist is their ability to understand your process, to make sense of what you’re going through. That’s helpful but it’s not enough.
I DON’T THINK THE WORLD IS CHANGING IN THE WAY I’D LIKE IT TO.
In these times of upheaval, confusion and anxiety, however, I think it may be useful to consider this:
“There is beauty all around us, only for so many people it is buried and perhaps obscured by fear, hurt, frustration, anger, hopelessness, confusion…….
