My gift as a therapist is to be with you in such a potent way that you feel welcomed to be with yourself, and finally to be yourself.
Most of us avoid our experience. If it's uncomfortable, we think it's unsafe, maybe even dangerous. Notice what happens in your body as you read this. Just the thought of avoiding your experience will stimulate the habit of avoidance, and the fear of all that has been avoided. It is this resistance to experience that escalates pain into suffering.
It is true that as children we may not have had the emotional or physical capacity to handle very intense emotions, especially if we did not have the support to do so. We may have learned to inhibit the body's natural response to trauma, such as screaming and crying. We went numb inside, losing trust in our organism to manage such intensity, and certainly losing trust in those we depended upon to be a safe container for our emotional expression.
When we avoid ourselves we become disconnected, and develop the gnawing sense that something is missing. We look everywhere, but since our seeking is external, what we find is never enough. We are left incomplete because we do not look toward the very place from which our seeking originates: our self. Believing we are insufficient and unworthy, we cannot imagine that all we seek is already inside us.
Believing in our inadequacy, we embark on a hypermasculine journey to improve, fix, change, or even transcend ourselves. This proves to be an effort with insubstantial rewards. One day, we hopefully will recognize that our value is discovered not in perfecting ourselves, but in accepting ourselves exactly as we are. And paradoxically, it is this acceptance that generates effortless transformation.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
As a therapist, I guide and support you to meet your experience instead of hiding from it. I can create a safe space for you to reconnect to your disowned aspects because I have made friends with my own. They have become my allies. I have found that by approaching, welcoming, even embracing my experience, something unexpected and remarkable occurs. Instead of being injured or destroyed, I am actually empowered.
The fear of our experience weakens us, while confronting the elements of our fear fortifies and emboldens us. We reclaim the energy that we had been using to defend against undesirable aspects, and recapture the energy trapped within them. Facing these disowned elements, we discover that they are composed of the same essence that underlies everything, and that all experience and phenomena emanate from a supportive, intelligent, and loving ground of Being.