“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself, just as I am, then I can change.”
Carl Rogers
AboutTherapy
Many of our present day issues stem from beliefs developed in childhood about ourselves and others. They may be around how trust worthy others are, how well our needs will be met or how deserving we believe ourselves to be. We develop defence mechanisms and coping strategies to protect ourselves from the emotional pain and anxiety that some of these beliefs cause. These beliefs and behaviours are an attempt to adapt to our family environment and they become the lens through which we respond to and expect to be treated in the outside world. We are not consciously aware of these adaptations, that we created so early in life, it's just "the way things are" and so we carry the same behaviours and beliefs into our adult lives. Although these strategies may have worked well to keep us safe as children, as adults they are often detrimental and can keep us away from the very thing that we require in order to heal and that is relationship. Therapy provides an opportunity to make these beliefs conscious and to get curious about the circumstances that made them necessary. Thanks to brain plasticity, through the corrective experiences that therapy can provide, we can change old limiting beliefs into ones that serve us better.
A bit about trauma
Trauma can happen in two ways, through commission or omission. Commission is when something that should not have happened, happens to us, such as an accident, assault or a disaster. These events are explicit and may be more easily put into words. Omission is something that should have happened for us but did not, in effect it is a missing experience. Unlike commission, omission is harder to put words to as, we cannot know what we didn't get. You may just sense that something is wrong, but not know what. So, trauma is not always an explicit event, it can also be small repeated experiences, such as being mis-attuned to or not having all of our emotions/needs welcomed (or a mixture of both). In therapy we can identify and make sense of these blindspots. We can then find ways to fill in some of the missing experiences.