Don’t confuse your symptoms with the core problem. Let me explain; a person goes to a physician with a fever. Yes, the patient would like to have the fever reduced. And that will be part of the physician’s care. However, the physician must first determine the cause of the fever. The doctor must work with you to figure out what has gone wrong that your body is responding with a fever. It could be a viral infection, a bacterial infection, inflammatory condition, even cancer.
Likewise, when you come to therapy and complain of anxiety, simply giving you techniques to ameliorate the symptom, as valuable as that is, is not all that is required. Discovering what has led to the anxiety in the first place must be central to your therapeutic process. The competent therapist must help you discover under what conditions you experience the anxiety, what you believe about yourself and others when you are experiencing the discomfort, perhaps compare this to other conditions when the distress is not present, and seek to trace life back to the earliest time you can remember the anxiety.
Deep work involves building a relationship of mutual respect and trust with the therapist in which you can dare to feel your feelings, and explore your history, the experiences that have formed or malformed you, and move from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What happened to me?” This involves you in formulating the healing elixir.
Techniques are great, but they alone are not therapy. Don’t think of yourself as a problem to be solved but a sacred soul to be understood, explored. A therapist worth their salt, should be working with you to build a relationship with yourself, teach you how to converse with yourself, encourage, rescue, sooth, lovingly correct, and finally celebrate yourself. No technique can do all of that, only a respectful relationship can. That takes a commitment to yourself. You are worth the investment!
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