Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Psychotherapy can be a powerful way to awaken from trance. It has been called "the truth game". In the context of a safe and nurturing relationship with a skilled therapist, we are challenged both to look within and without - with open eyes.
While this can be difficult to accept (not to mention, productively work with) - many of us still carry unconscious, infantile motivations. These include previously unacknowledged - often frozen and repressed emotions - such as sadness, terror and rage.
The healthier we are, the greater our willingness to turn and face these emotions; the less healthy we are, the more committed we will be to denying them. This "unfinished business" is like excess baggage that only serves to drag down and muddle our efforts towards positive societal change.
It is important to understand that, due to the cognitive, emotional, spiritual impoverishment of modern culture, and the number of children raised without a nurturing and supportive family is growing. This lack of nurturing can be quite subtle and difficult to pinpoint without outside help.
Naturally, young people mature into adult physical bodies, yet our "emotional bodies" can be childish. Dominated by the belief that we must present a fa??ade of maturity, too many of us can perhaps be more accurately be described as "adult children". We are often in denial about this state of affairs. Even as we see and present ourselves as "adults" (to ourselves and others) - a great many of us are people who - lacking wholeness and a healthy sense of self - continue to experience life as if we stuck in the past.
In our inner life we experience ourselves as needy children - crippled by the suffering we have undergone in childhood and our unconscious denial of this suffering. In this way we commonly seek to fill our sense of emptiness with things like of social power, prestige, money, sex, and drugs (legal and illegal), and any other activity we believe will fill our often unconscious, but still agonizing, "hole in the soul".
The Context of Psychotherapy
Ideally, from the very start, a therapist unequivocally relates to his or her client as an equal - a fellow human being just like the clinician... rather than as a "patient." As a bottom-line, a proficient therapist utilizes: 1) unconditional positive regard (or warmth), 2) accurate empathy and 3) genuineness. They also have the capacity to demonstrate profound respect and constructively confront their client.
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