Have you ever thought “maybe one day I will read something that changes the way I feel about myself and how I relate with the world”…
I often hoped I would… but no self-help book (except maybe the “The Power of Now”) has ever made me understand why I feel anxious all the time and why I shoot myself in the foot.
It was a university text-book about counselling that made me start to have a FELT EXPERIENCE OF INSIGHT… Specifically it was the chapter about Sigmund Freud and his theory psychoanalysis… even more specifically it was the sentence that I highlighted here.
I was holding back tears when I realised that being an anxious child helped me get my needs met when I was too young to remember. Needing my mother’s help with practical matters was (and is to this day) our “love language”.
As an aspiring psychotherapist I believe this has given me important insight into just how hard it can be to make these things surface – I practically had to dedicate my whole life and career just to achieving that “aha” moment where the feelings start to come up and things start to flow.
I am looking forward to continuing the path to what Jung called “individuation”… In particular I am looking forward to doing the “fun stuff” of sitting on the couch in a reverie analysing dreams and doing free association 😀
Hopefully now that I am getting trained up to be a therapist and have partially walked the path myself I can help people do it more easily than it was for me.