Nurture and New Year
Welcome 2024 and goodbye 2023!
There will be discounts on gym memberships, products marketed that will “change your life” and lots of talk about resolutions. You may feel a fire of inspiration and optimism, or like your drowning in a never ending cycle of new years and hopeful new you’s.
At NURTURE we believe that there is value in therapy for everyone. In our world “therapy” could be synonymous with “growth”. How could anyone argue the growth? Though as humans, we tend to strongly dislike transitions. Even if it benefits our lives, change is difficult.
As our culture shifts and therapy becomes more accepted and mainstream, it helpful to define what therapy is, and consider what it isn’t.
Therapy is…
Hard
A good therapist will challenge you. It may be triggering to dredge up past experiences or have someone call you out. It can also be a deeply moving experience to work with a safe, grounded and neutral person to face challenges. Our minds work hard in childhood to develop coping mechanisms that help us survive the world we live in. Many of those coping mechanisms that serve us well in childhood become maladaptive as we age. As adults we can subconsciously cling to them as if our very life depends on it. A therapist will help you identify the patterns, relationships and stories that are working against you. If it’s easy…it’s not helping you grow.
Nuanced
Deep down you will always know yourself and your people better than the therapist. There are times your therapist may push up against what you think you “know”. The job of a therapist is not to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do, but to help you come to your own conclusions. Therapy is also not all about validation, much of it is to help you take accountability where you can. This can make people feel defensive and if you can sit through it, empowering. If you give 100% fault to someone else, you give away your power too. Events are complicated and can rarely be perceived in one way. Therapists don’t have a crystal ball to tell the future. We can’t know exactly what happened in the past. We are trained in listening and finding connections. We make connections between past and present, present and future and for those of us who have done it for many years, we can weave together the stories of other humans we have come alongside. Humans don’t have new problems, they are recycled among all of us, often with unique manifestations, but similar story lines.
Be weary of a therapist who is speaking in absolutes…good or bad, wrong or right, leave or stay. It is the job of a therapist to help you find the “AND’s”. Some of them are a little easier, “I love my children, AND I need to set some boundaries to have my own time.” Some are way more difficult and complex, “I had a childhood where I didn’t feel seen by my parents or one where I experienced trauma AND that has made me full of shame AND it put me in a situation where I accept bad behavior from my spouse AND I want it to change AND I am afraid of change AND I know I need to do some work AND I don’t want to.” If it’s black and white…it’s not helping you see that life is rarely binary, complicated matters require a lot of patience and grace.
Like a Mirror
Like any mirror, sometimes you will like what you see, and other times you won’t. The most important thing is that you already have everything you need inside of you, and your therapist can help show you the path to uncover what is hidden. A therapist is reflecting back to you your story, both the events that have happened in your life, and in some cases helping you find a different way of viewing the story. Our memories are not a recollections of events. They are not fact. Our memories are made of stories we tell ourselves. They are based on many factors like our developmental age, how we were “feeling” when the event happened, culture, race, gender, our childhood, trauma history and so many more components and influences. When we recall events in a thereuputic environment, the clinician is helping you retell and possibly see things in a new and different way. Eventually you will find that you have everything inside you that you need and the therapist is just facilitating YOU seeing you. If it is all about coping mechanisms and quick fixes…its not helping you see your own story and find your truth.
The fact is we are growing and changing until our last breath. We will never know how or what it is like to take our last breath, therefore we are always learning. Let’s face it…learning sometimes sucks.
You don’t need a new you! Maybe it would be beneficial to have a new witness to your story.
- Lauren Peabody & The NURTURE Family