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Feeling Lighter as the Goal of Therapy?

December 5, 2024

One thing that I find particularly interesting about psychotherapy is that there are different schools of thought about what a person should strive to become. For example, to name a few:

  • Aristotelians say it’s happiness
  • Buddhists say it’s enlightenment
  • Yogis say it’s self-realisation
  • Humanists say it’s self-acualisation
  • Psychoanalysts say it’s integration of the unconscious mind
  • Adlerians say it’s moving from inferiority to superiority
  • Jungians say it’s individuation
  • Christians say it’s moving closer to God
  • In the person-centred approach it is moving upwards in the continuum to stage-7
  • Positive psychologists say it’s wellbeing
  • Logotherapists say it’s living a meaningful life

I would like to borrow the word “self-realisation” for my counselling framework. This is because realisation implies an “aha” moment. It is these moments of insight that lead to greater self-understanding.

Is this self-understanding the goal of therapy? Life is undoubtedly better after you have had a successful course of therapy and have realised things that were previously unknown. Behaviour that previously frustrated you (that’s why you went to a counsellor) may start to change.

Carl Rogers thought that moving closer to the truth was always a good thing.

In my own approach, a sense of lightness or levity seems to be the end result of successful self-development, such as:

  • Adopting a long-term meditation habit
  • Breaking a bad habit
  • Completing a successful course of psychotherapy

That’s why I purchased the domain name “levitism.com” (levitas being Latin for lightness).

I feel that if a person was to deliberately set out to become lighter they might find themselves frustrated by life (in particular by other people in one’s life).

It seems to me that the path to lightness is not something you strive towards directly.

Sometimes lightness may come from confronting the things that make us feel heavy, realising why we have held on all this time and are making the choices we do. In this way we may become more troubled before we are to become less troubled.

On the other hand, sometimes lightness isn’t always about struggling with things. For example when we are truly in a state of flow in the present moment we are letting go of worrying about the past or future for a time.

Sometimes we have to take some time out of our day or our year to struggle with doing hard things… such as going to the gym or going to family-therapy. And then we feel lighter afterwards as a result.

Perhaps there are 2 ways to feel lightness:

  1. To be strong
  2. To carry little

Perhaps then, the goal of life is to continually move towards becoming stronger and releasing your grip.