Are you and your loved ones safe?
We always start there. You cannot make progress in your life without establishing a sense of relative safety for your situation. (If your immediate response to this suggestion is despair, stay with me! Remember every post-apocalyptic movie you’ve ever watched—if they can inch toward safety, you can too). The standards for safety are different, depending on your life.
By the way, what is your situation?
We start with a broad overview in case things you mention are painful and flag areas in which you would like to feel better. Good therapy is not an opportunity to relive every horrible thing that has ever happened in your life. It is a place where we can figure out what keeps you up at night and see if we can make today’s experience better (even today’s experience of stuff you might know comes from something in your past.
Next, we treat trauma.
Trauma sounds like a big, scary word. It’s not. Trauma is when an experience overwhelms your ability to deal—it’s the psychological experience of straining a muscle or throwing out your back. Have you ever tried to do too many things on your computer and had it freeze on you? It’s that. There are effective, research-based ways to help you accurately know when it’s safe to rest and when it’s circumstantially in your best interest to feel uneasy. Trauma screws that process up. I can help with that. When you feel balanced, we can strategize better.
Grieve, if needed.
This goes hand in hand with trauma work. When something happens that hurts, even if we can’t change it, we need to be able to feel. Healthy emotions move. When we feel sad in a way that doesn’t overwhelm our ability to cope, we make room to feel something else. People are made to feel a range of emotions. If you feel stuck—like you really can’t feel more than pain or nothing—lets work together to get you feeling again. It’s not about some great emotional purge that makes you remember all the stuff that makes you feel worse. It’s about processing feelings in a safe, contained way so that you can feel ready to move on to a wider range of feelings. The main rule of painful feelings is that we never explore a feeling without knowing how to reconnect you to good feelings. If life is a photograph, trauma likes to zoom in on one color. We need to be able to see that color but be able to see the other colors in the picture too.
Feel out the new normal.
Change is like pen ink—it needs a little time to set. The sessions that are triumphant reviews of progress may not feel as moving, but they are essential to long-term change. To establish change over time, it is important to notice ways in which your body and heart feel different; that’s what makes those feelings become your new normal. The temptation is to leave therapy the second you start feeling better. It is fine if you have completed your goals, but do make sure you stay long enough after progress to set the change.
We go back and forth between working on issues and setting the new normal until you are happy with how you are feeling and growing.
Create a new plan for a feel-good life.
What do you want now? Do we need to tweak the safety plan? We built a temporary sense of emotional shelter in the beginning. What do you want the actual house to look like? How can you incorporate what you’ve learned on your journey into a feel-good life? Maybe you’re an Upworthy story just waiting to happen. Or maybe you’re just ready to enjoy more of what you have. Let’s see what dreams lay dormant in your heart.
The goal of every therapist is to get fired!
Let me know when you’re happy with your progress. I will always be here for you if you decide you want to come back.