If you can see what’s going on you can do it yourself, Seeing what’s going on is challenging though, especially for the patient. I’m clearly no expert, but perhaps I can provoke the reader into response, no?
The therapist asks you to describe everything, tell your story, open up, explain, define, detail etc. They allow you to paint the landscape, but they’re not just looking for the painting, they’re looking for the brush strokes. Hidden, sometimes better, sometimes worse, are the mechanisms that we use to create and tell ourselves the story of our lives. The creation of one’s own identity, is done with one’s own brushes, and the brushes are our metaphors, our analogies, our reasons, and our own explanations. Many layers can be painted at the same time.
If the therapist can discover your brushes, the tools which you use to create your own identity, he can flush out the broken ones, the problematic ones, the brushes that create swathes of pain, or confusion on our lives.
My therapist once discovered that I didn’t use emotional language. I only detailed my experiences as logical equations. I would recount an event and explain why it happened. I didn’t spend any of my words on my feelings about what had happened. I simply used my dominant analytical skills to render a judgment of the event as to prove that I had been wronged. But I wasn’t in a court, I was in pain. What he helped me to do, with force, was blurt out how the event made me feel. Then a light went on in the room. All of a sudden I had two languages, and I knew that I needed to be able to tell the story in both. To say what happened in the event, and then to take full account of how it made me feel. I could then see that I could learn to protect my happiness, my well being, by avoiding events, and patterns of behavoir or even patterns of interpretation that would yield painful emotions. I could see that the construction of the story in my head, of my life, of my personality was a manifold affair. It was much more complicated than simply showing up and responding to what happens. If I wanted more from my days I had to approach things with both ears turned on. The rational and the emotional.
To this day though, my emotional conversation isn’t the dominant one. I do believe that it is rich, and I do believe that regular English does a poor job of an emotional language. To paraphrase Ken Robinson, “We only educate people from the neck up.”
One of these days I’m going to make a little chart that proves to people that I’m not as emotionally shallow as I appear, it’s just that I’m polyphonic. I’m like everybody else, but my music, I believe, is at a longer, slower wavelength than others.