Your
website points out the importance of client and therapist honesty; however,
if a person has spent a lifetime avoiding and denying emotions, please advise
as to how to begin “opening up.” How is the “vault” to
be opened when a person doesn’t have the combination?
Well, keeping with your metaphor of the vault, the treasure
in the vault, as you intuitively suggest, is your collection of denied
emotions. Since denied emotions cause most psychological problems, most of
the work of psychotherapy hinges on learning to recognize and express those
emotions. To get at this treasure, though, it doesn’t help much if an
incompetent psychotherapist just keeps asking you, “So how does that
make you feel?” If you could answer that question, you wouldn’t
need psychotherapy, would you?
So, continuing
with your metaphor of the vault, the psychotherapist must be a sort of
safecracker. Just as old safes in the past could be “cracked” by
listening to the fall of the tumblers, the psychotherapist can crack the
“combination” of your
unconscious
by listening to various aspects of your speech and language. Things such
as misspoken words (“Freudian slips”), hesitations, and attempts
to change the subject all give clues to your unconscious conflicts—and
to the treasure of emotions that, like old silver, have been covered with
tarnish.
Your job, then,
is simply to speak. Your psychotherapist’s job is to listen carefully
to what you say, focus in on meaningful points of your speech (crack open
the conflict), and then help you articulate the emotions (clean off the
tarnish).
Of course,
articulating the emotions can be hard, so the psychotherapist will have to
teach you as you go along. You might be asked to identify physical sensations.
You might be asked to speak about images or memories that come to mind as
you think about a current experience. You might be asked to speak about your
dreams.
All sorts of techniques could be used, but their primary intent is to lead
you from that seemingly meaningless slip or hesitation into a full experience
of the emotions that are hidden within it. This requires nothing of you but
an honest response to whatever your psychotherapist asks of you.
You yourself,
however, cannot control this process of discovery, so don’t bother trying.
Encounters
with the unconscious happen spontaneously and unexpectedly. So just speak
about anything that comes to mind, and let your psychotherapist do his or
her job of listening, noticing, and teaching.
If this sounds
hard, then take a deep breath, because this is only the first step
of the psychotherapy process. Just so you know what you’re in for, here
are all three steps:
1. |
You must learn
that you have emotions—both pleasant and unpleasant—and how to
recognize and name them. |
 |
2. |
You must learn
that all the unpleasant and frightening emotions which you have been pushing
out of awareness all your life have been secret causes for all the problems
and conflicts you have been experiencing all your life. Therefore, you must
examine your past very carefully so as to make a conscious, enlightened
connection between your repressed emotions and your behavioral problems.
This scrutiny will show you how your life, up to now, has been largely controlled
by the unconscious
repetition of old
emotional conflicts. |
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3. |
Having mastered
the previous step so that you can easily recognize how the problems from
the past have been influenced by your emotions, you now must learn to recognize
your emotions right in the present, as they occur in the moment, and then
make a conscious decision to do something new, something more healthy and
beneficial to your well-being than merely be controlled by the unconscious
repetition of old emotional conflicts. |
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No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
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Huh?
Freewill website?
his is a
FREEWILL WEBSITE with NO
ADVERTISING. If you find this page to be informative and helpful,
please send a freewill donation, even if it’s only a few dollars, to
help offset my costs in making this website available, without charge or
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