|
|
|
      
|
Uniqueness In-Depth Psycho-Therapy Healing Because we understand, at the Center, that the inner beliefs and the emotional states, behaviors and relational problems, discussed in the "Wounds" section, are symptoms of the person's wounded-ness, we do not place value judgements on them. We also help you do the same. So many people end up with these kinds of inner judgements: "You must be a terrible person if you: believe that; do that; relate that way." Furthermore, we turn to these manifestations of ‘ancient' pain as being a valuable tool that will help us to help you to be healed of that pain. In other words, our way of helping you, will be to help you face whatever pain it is that you suffer in your inner world as they are expressed through these symptoms. By doing so, the problematic beliefs, emotional states, behaviors, and relational problems will be healed not by forcing them to change but rather by understanding what they are saying to us. Finally, we understand these behaviors, as adaptions we made as children to deal with problems and events in our lives to the best of our extremely limited capabilities. The adaptions worked in the sense because they got us through the very difficult circumstances of our childhood. So, although they harm us today, they didn't at one time. For instance, a child whose mother was chronically angry and irritable, a good way to mollify that anger was to read very carefully the tonal inflections of the mother's voice, facial expressions, body posture and carriage as signals to the mother's mood. The child then, interpreting what they meant could then scurry to forestall an angry outburst by doing something that was designed to please or distract the mother. That child then grows into an adult who is hyper-sensitive to every tonal and body nuance of everyone around him. As a child, that strategy worked. As an adult, to put all that energy into interpreting and jumping to conclusions about everyone's mood, is at best energy draining. Thus, our approach here at the Center is to regard the attitudinal, emotional, behavioral and relational manifestations that are problematic to the individual with kindness not harshness and work at understanding what they mean. When we find out what they mean, we can change our need for them. An example of this is the man, who as he began his meal obsessed on what he would have for dessert. Dessert was so important to him that, if there wasn't something there for dessert, he was known to have traveled 50 miles to get one that would satisfy that craving. Of course with that kind of addictive behavior around food, he had enormous weight problems throughout his life. All of this puzzled him greatly. In his mind, he knew he didn't need the dessert. He even knew from experience that, even once he got it, it was only a temporary ‘fix' because the moment after he had finished, he needed another and so on. One day, as we talked, his epiphany came after a life long struggle with this problem. He realized that there was a little boy inside who believed that, unless he gets dessert, he has no worth. The origins (the original wound) came from a family in which food was a struggle (‘unless you finish everything on your plate, you cannot leave the table; you cannot have dessert, etc.') There were intense struggles at the family table about that, not only in relationship to him, but his sister as well. In that family dynamic, he came to attach the receiving of dessert as an affirmation of his value as a person. The absence of dessert meant the absence of his value as a person. So now, that boy existing inside this grown, now middle aged man believed that unless he got dessert, he was not a good/worthful person. The drive to get the dessert wasn't about dessert. It was about an affirmation of his worth-full-ness. So driving 50 miles was about his value as a person, a matter of life and death. With this understanding of the meaning of dessert, the importance placed on and amount of energy put into getting it, made perfect sense. When he was eating his dinner that night, the pre-occupation about dessert and the compulsion at all costs to have dessert overtook him. This time though, he did something very different. He silently said to the boy inside, ‘You know, we really don't need dessert to be ok as a person. We are ok just the way we are.' Much to his astonishment, the urge evaporated. The next night it happened again, with somewhat less intensity. His response was the same and, like the evening before, the urge disappeared. Every time it happened, he did the same thing. After a few weeks, the compulsion disappeared. Occasionally it re-surfaced, he would treat it the same way and it would end. Today, he hardly thinks of desserts. Instead of rejecting the behavior and that part of him who caused the behavior, he embraced it to get at its underlying meaning. When he did so, the meaning was revealed, he addressed it. It was in the embracing of the meaning that his healing had occurred. As long as he tried to control the behavior (diets, resisting getting the dessert), the amount of energy he put into the diet or not getting the dessert was enormous only have the benefits of either disappear the moment he let his guard down. Once, however, he got to the root of the food problem, the food problem went away because the underlying pain that was being covered up by the desserts (Am I worthful?) was addressed and healed. Back To In-Depth Psycho-Therapy |
Web
Site Developed By: |
|
 |
