Psychotherapy is a process. If you can believe that all living organisms require a cocoon in order to transform into something else, then therapy can be that cocoon. You sit week to week with a psychotherapist who knows what the process is and listens attentively. You pay for it so the process is marked as something that needs to have some achievable results.
Jung wrote extensively of the process of individuation and rebirth. He urged getting rid of moralising and seeing every action as part of a process. Moralising tends to keep one in a simple, one dimensional compass-it reduces creative ways of thinking about problems.
For e.g, if your spouse cheated on you, you would go into some reactive mode – leave or make charges, file for divorce etc.
On the other hand, you could ask ‘why now?’ which may lead to a better understanding of how someone may have reacted :
- for eg, was it the onset of midlife (starting from mid 20s) or
- The coming of age of children, the uncomfortable feelings they arouse and the displacement of such feelings onto an outsider.
- It could lead to an understanding of how the person’s parents behaved at a similar time-
- in a family that lives together, more often than not, we pick up behaviour that is embedded deeply rather than the ‘we must not do this and that’ which we constantly repeat to ourselves.
If my son for eg breaks a plate, the doorbell is ringing and I find out I have lost my wallet I am more likely to behave like my parents than all the taught behaviour of how I must react because the crisis disbands studied ways of thinking. It takes us back to our primitive roots.
Psychotherapy that can bring about change, that punctuation in your attitudes and behaviour if you allow it to.
