Over the years, I have noticed that most people do not come to therapy because they have decided they want to change. They come because change has already found them. A relationship comes to an end. A child is born. The body begins to speak through symptoms. Someone they love dies. Depression or anxiety can no longer be ignored. Suddenly, the way they have lived until then no longer works, while a new way of living has not yet emerged.<\/p>\n
I think much of psychotherapy takes place in this liminal space between no longer and not yet. It is a place of loss and possibility at the same time. In many ways, psychotherapy is an art of mourning. Not only the loss of people or relationships, but also the loss of familiar ways of understanding ourselves, identities that once organised our lives, and the ways we learned, often very early, to protect ourselves.<\/p>\n
After almost twenty years of practice, there are a few things I have gradually learned to trust.<\/p>\n
One is that every inner obstacle was once a solution.<\/b> For this reason, I approach each person’s psychological organisation with deep respect, even when it has become a source of suffering. My first task is not to change it, but to understand it. Before we can move towards where we hope to be, we need to understand how we came to be where we are.<\/p>\n
Another is that the psyche has its own rhythm and its own logic of development.<\/b> When it encounters enough safety, enough time and enough presence, it sometimes begins \u2013 after a very long time \u2013 to breathe again. And with that breath comes movement. Something that had remained still for years begins to reorganise itself in the direction it has been trying to reach all along. I do not think this happens in isolation. I believe it happens in relationship, when another person offers enough safety for us to remain in contact with our own experience without having to turn away from it.<\/p>\n
Loss makes room for possibility.<\/b> Again and again, I have seen that when people find the courage to let go of what can no longer continue, possibilities emerge that had previously been unimaginable.<\/p>\n
Professor Maurice Apprey, one of the contemporary psychoanalysts who has profoundly influenced my understanding of the human psyche, once said, “Behind every resistance lies a treasure.”<\/em><\/strong> My clinical experience continues to confirm this. I have come to see psychological defences not as obstacles to therapy, but as deeply meaningful attempts to preserve something that once needed protecting. When we approach them with enough curiosity, patience and safety, they often begin to reveal what they have been carrying all along.<\/p>\n Perhaps this is, ultimately, how I understand psychotherapy. Not as a process of becoming someone else, or becoming morally “better”, but as one that creates the conditions in which we can become more fully ourselves, gradually learning to trust our own direction of growth. For many of us, this was not always possible \u2013 or even safe. Yet I have found that the closer we come to who we are, the more life begins to open before us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the years, I have noticed that most people do not come to therapy because they have decided they want to change. They come because change has already found them. A relationship comes to an end. A child is born. The body begins to speak through symptoms. Someone they love dies. Depression or anxiety can …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":2109,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2112","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n