Knowing yourself
is the beginning of all wisdom.
- Aristotle
Therapy Cultivates Curiosity, Acceptance & Self Awareness
Therapy builds upon our inborn drive to heal. By modeling curiosity and acceptance, a therapist can show you how to relate to those parts of yourself in a way that invites them to come forward, be known and be healed. A therapist helps you to stay with your experience and notice the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which you take in nourishment or shut it out. This kind of awareness is transformative in and of itself and also a catalyst to further transformation.
Therapy Helps us Work With Life
In the therapy hour, your present moment experience, whether it be joy or despair, uncertainty or boredom, can be the subject of inquiry and a source of insight. At first you may need help opening to each moment and gleaning its gifts. That's what therapy is for. A therapist can help you become more interested in what "is" happening than what "shoud be" happening. With support, acceptance and awareness, even hard blows become rich opportunities for insight, growth and transformation.
Therapy Helps us to Gain Access to the Wisdom of our Bodies
Our bodies are a source of information about safety, vitality, passion, pleasure, fluidity, openness, and more. By tuning into their signals, we learn what excites us, where we"re stuck, what we should move toward and when we should retreat.
Therapy Helps us Tap in to the Power of our Emotions
Our emotions are a source of important information about safety, comfort, nourishment, desire and more. They are a catalyst for action and a wellspring of insight. While unprocessed or unresolved emotions can stifle the free flow of energy, creativity, and resourcefulness, emotions that are followed through to completion (even very painful ones), lose their grip on us and leave us more open, adaptable and resilient.
A therapist can help you tune into your feelings, stay present with them and move through them to discover what they are communicating a need, a desire, an impulse, a direction. A therapist can help you learn the language and logic of feelings, how to recognize them, how to listen to them, how to regulate them and how to skillfully communicate them.
The Therapeutic Relationship Itself is Healing
The therapeutic relationship can be a powerful and sacred container in which you receive the kind of undivided attention that is hard to get in the outside world. It is helpful to work through relational challenges in the context of therapy so you can become clear and calm enough to learn how to navigate the waters safely. This kind of deep, authentic relationship provides you an experience of healthy relating that tends to transform your relationship to yourself and others.
Therapy Rewires the Brain
From the very first moments of our lives until our very last breath, our brains are changing in response to other brains. We are born with “resonance circuits” that enable us to feel into and be affected by the brain state of another person. Certain brain states which come about in the context of close relationships facilitate the growth of new neuronal connections that integrate the brain and lead to greater coherence and stability.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. -- Carl Jung