As a busy therapist in New York City, I treat people who have been hurt long enough and deeply enough when they were children, not just once or twice but year after year, and they become wilted like plants deprived of water and sunlight. The wilting occurs automatically and they never understand it. No matter how they were specifically abused - whether via emotional abuse, verbal abuse, gestures, beatings, cold indifference or abandonment - they know a great, terrible thing has happened to them. That thing is the pure child's rage they feel toward the people they need and love, those people who are still a precious part of them, the very people who abused them!
This child abuse is an excruciating dilemma for very small children. They virtually always resolve it in favor of those they love by feeling something is horribly wrong with themselves deep inside. Because it's so hideous, they make believe it never happened. Their rage is smothered by feelings of terror and utter helplessness. And these feeling are almost magically replaced by an illusion that nothing ever happened to begin with. But these children don't just forget. They start to act as if they were somebody else. As they grow to adolescence they lose themselves. By the time they've reached adulthood they hardly know who they really are. They've become trapped in fantasies and illusions they created along the way about themselves and what their lives are supposed to be about. Many end up suffering from depression and various addictions as adults and may find themselves in abusive relationships. Earlier they may have suffered from teenage depression, teen alcoholism or eating disorders. In some, their suffering may trigger manic depression. Almost all require periods of counseling and therapy.
Uncovering psychotherapy strives to put you in touch with your primal, infantile self - the pure, nascent, reactive you beaten back by your childhood terror and kept from mixing with and flavoring the later personas you became as your body grew and matured. The therapy has to do with a slow, sometimes painful, pealing away of a lifetime of illusions and defensive attitudes and the expression of deeper, hidden feelings you didn't know you had - feelings that may seem unbearable or even unmanageable - utter helplessness, deep disgusting shame, guilt that makes you weak, panic, self-loathing or overpowering sadness - emotions that lie beneath the defensive posturing, game playing, smugness and self-effacement in daily life that disguise them and keep them from ever being felt in their pure form, let alone openly expressed.
If your therapist earns your trust, if you come to feel safe with him and believe he truly cares about you, you start ever so slowly to shift your raw, hidden feelings onto him. You make him the brunt of these feelings in spite of yourself. What your therapist must be able do for you in these moments - and this is the most important thing any therapist can ever do for you - is take your feelings, accept and understand them, more clearly than you've ever been able to do alone. If your therapist is solid enough, comfortable enough with himself to do this, you get to see another human being actually living with, able to survive and make sense out of your most frightful feelings. Slowly they become less terrifying. You can begin to take them back inside yourself, live with them more easily and start to think about how you might use them like high octane fuel to work for you in the present.
The urge to shift your most hidden, infantile feelings onto your therapist is the most crucial part of any psychotherapy no matter what label it comes under. This urge stems from a life-giving need to express ourselves before trusted others, to get acknowledgement and appreciation of the deepest aspects of ourselves, a natural, healthy need often tragically frustrated in childhood by well-meaning parents and caretakers. The best response from your therapist - in many ways like that of a mentor - is to acknowledge your raw, primitive feelings and encourage you to mix them creatively in the present with the more mature aspects of yourself - without fear of being judged, persecuted or, worst of all, getting no response at all.
This is exciting work for patient and therap... No, not patient and therapist. Medical terms like patient and therapist don't do the participants justice. It's more truthful to call them protégé and mentor. In French, the word protégé refers to someone protected, sheltered and nurtured by a caring person, the mentor. In therapy the words describe two people working together in a deep, collaborative relationship, with the mentor helping clear up confusions, making unknowns lurking in the unconscious knowable to the protégé. And in any deep relationship, emotions inevitably boil to the surface - frustrating, frightening emotions that often result in overwhelming sadness and make the relationship stressful. But no matter how charged the work gets, it can ultimately lead to your feeling freer, more spontaneous, able to take things from life you could never let yourself have before.
A Psychotherapy Group in the
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160 Bleecker Street, 9C East, New
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