I don’t know exactly what you’re going through, but I can imagine that if you have taken the time to search for help, you may be in a great deal of pain. You may also be wondering if there’s any real hope out here for you – if anyone will truly understand and provide relief from your suffering.
When people come into my office, oftentimes they don’t know exactly how talking about their problems will help anything, but they have come anyway because they didn’t know what else to do. They have tried talking to friends and family members and even tried following their advice, but to no avail; nothing has shifted their ongoing sense of sadness and futility.
Many of my clients have discovered that therapy can help. It has given them the opportunity to slow down and to reflect upon feelings and behavior patterns that they didn’t know they had. Just this recognition alone is half the battle in the process of change. Clients have told me time and again that once they were able to see what has kept them feeling trapped in pain and sadness, they were able to transition out of it.
I would like to share with you a composite example of several clients which I hope will help you better understand what therapy can do for you.
I will call this client Barbara.
When Barbara came to me she told me that her house was a mess. She said that she had never allowed her home to exist in such a state, but that she was unable to get it together to clean it – that even her bills were going unpaid. “I really don’t understand it and I’m just sick of myself. I’m watching myself destroy my credit, eat all the wrong foods and gain more and more weight. I can’t help my own self. It’s like I don’t even want to, so I certainly hope that you can.”
When I asked Barbara if she could recall when she first began to feel this way, she said that her job situation was annoying her. “I keep doing all the work and everyone else keeps getting all the credit. It’s a real corporate culture and everybody is looking out for number one. They all depend upon me but it’s like I’m a cog in a wheel. This one guy who I just trained was promoted above me and nobody even noticed that I was the one who trained his dumb behind.”
I observed that as Barbara spoke of feeling upset, she smile very sweetly at me. When I brought this to her attention, she remarked that she wasn’t aware that she did that, but that she could imagine that she did it because she didn’t want anyone to think that she was a bad person or “an angry black woman”, so she masked her feelings with a smile. Barbara began to explore other times in her life when she had disguised her feelings and together we started to uncover when this sort of repression had begun.
Over the course of our work together, Barbara began to trace her habit of concealing her emotions to a secret that she had never shared with anyone. “I was about seven years old. My mom worked late so her boyfriend looked after us after school until she got home. My mom’s boyfriend molested me and told me that no one would believe me if I told. You want to know why I smile? I remember making sure that I was a smiling, happy kid for my mother so that she would never suspect anything was wrong. I still can’t believe that I never told, that I believed him. I was just so stupid and so it went on and on. My mind tells me that I was only seven, but I still feel like I should have known better, that I was just as responsible. And I’m so ashamed of it, even now, as I’m telling you.” The telling of the secret was incredibly painful for Barbara, but in the end she was extraordinarily relieved that someone else knew.
Keeping silent at work, putting a smile on her face and just going along, triggered experiences as a seven year old girl which brought on a deep depression. As a child, Barbara could not comprehend the complexity of emotions overwhelming her, so she suppressed them. But now, as an adult, those pent up emotions felt as tight as a child’s jumper. Neither the jumper, nor the repression fit her life now. She needed to liberate herself from the weight and the shame of the secret.
Barbara continues to work on reclaiming her voice and giving herself permission to have her own feelings. She is beginning to understand what it means to speak up for herself and to set clear boundaries for her own self-care. “For the first time, I feel like I can revel in my own self and to put myself first. I really do feel like it’s alright to be the star of my own life now.”
In Barbara’s therapeutic journey, we uncovered many different experiences that were very difficult to remember and to face, yet she was committed to the process and, after hard work, found herself releasing life-giving energy which had been trapped in stuffed feelings for many years. If you are ready to begin your journey, take the first step and call me.
