The call to therapy is often rooted in pain. Feelings of overwhelm or distress in navigating our lives and relationships, can, for everyone, at points, feel difficult to manage alone. There is a hope behind reaching out. Perhaps initially the hope is for support, for the distress to ease, or maybe the search is for solutions. There may also be  a drive to find a clarity for ourselves that leads to the possibility for something to be lastingly different.

When our distress feels so obviously rooted in the present a therapist's interest in our past can feel frustrating, maybe even a little cliched. A good therapist should be able to hold a balance between past and present, but whatever the therapeutic discipline the majority of therapists will also believe that revisiting our past enables a more expansive future.

What if our distress is a call to do something differently?

In the middle of my marriage breaking down I was plagued by eczema, under my skin, in my ears, my eyes. It became debilitating, requiring visits to emergency clinics, impossible to ignore. My body was shouting at me, you can’t do this anymore, do something differently.

Our distress can manifest in many different ways, illness, anxiety, depression, addictions, busyness, OCD, a life that just doesn’t seem to cut us any breaks. These are the multitude of ways of trying to regulate ourselves and our distress, until finally something gets too loud, we have to notice, and listen to the call to do something differently.

Here is where the therapist gets interested in the past. To know how to do something differently, first we need to understand our learnt patterns, and that which we keep repeating. 

Therapy challenges the assumptions we hold about ourselves and how we are in the world.

The question becomes who am I if I am more than my history, more than what is expected of me, more than the roles I play. And behind the question we need to become curious about the learning of our history, and the ways we inhabit our life.

As an attachment informed therapist I believe we are hard wired to attach. Humans mature slowly, literally we need to be cared for to survive. As fundamental as food and shelter, nurture and relationship is needed to keep us safe, and we learn to love to keep us safe.

Culture and family are the place we learn to be loveable I need to … as a woman I should … a man needs too …  it’s normal to … If we are lucky our family is also curious and responsive to what we bring, but even the most privileged of childhoods is peppered with relational misattunements and demands which send us forth into the world wearing a relational straight jacket of sorts, fashioning what we expect for and of ourselves.

Therapy is at its heart about relationship, and, I believe, therapy should be a collaborative endeavour. A relationship in which, although you might reveal more about yourself, I will still be known. A relationship like no other, in which there is healing in sitting together, week after week, willing to trust; to risk; to be known; to be curious; to be open to possibility. 

If we are courageous enough the therapeutic relationship is the vehicle through which we know ourselves differently.

Here I lose my words,  because although we have clear theory, grounded in evidence-based practice, which offers clarity for where we might be going, and why we might be doing it, each therapeutic journey is a unique and relational one. The growth emerges in an alchemy between the therapist and client. Time and again I find wonder in healing beyond that which was imagined, or hoped for at the start of the process. 

What starts from an enquiry driven by distress, can turn into a rich relational journey in which you are met, accepted and known deeply.

In the process we are enabled to find agency, new ways of being, and a deep tenderness for ourselves and what needed to be.