THERAPY

Some of the goals of therapy

To find ways to love and accept love

How to stop getting stuck in feeling bad about yourself

To create a fuller and happier life

To find ways out of helplessness and the feelings of being overwhelmed

To find a way out of the unnecessary pains, sadness, and losses in our lives

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

HABITS

       People often refer to a pattern of behavior as a "habit",  perhaps a good habit or more commonly a bad habit.  If the person is pointing at a bad habit,  he/she will often follow up this observation with something like "I got to break this bad habit" or "I just have to stop this bad habit".   This person has categorized this pattern of behavior as something like a reflex, something that is automatic.  Often the pattern of behavior, the habit,  is automatic.  Yet, to think of it as a kind of reflex, like a knee jerk, is a mistake.  The mistake is that the person is trying to take away the meanings of the pattern of behavior and hence, the motivations propelling the habit.   Certainly, there is value in stopping the "bad" habit, but what is also needed is an understanding of what propels this now almost automatic behavior.    The set of motivations involved in the habit are connected to his/her experience and needs.   This person must find a way to treat him/her self in a kinder and more thoughtful manner, rather than as a "behaving" machine.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

TRANSTROMER


Tomas Transtromer, nobel prize for literature
THE COUPLE
They turn the light off, and its white globe glows
an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet
in a glass of darkness. Then a rising.
The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.
Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep,
but their most secret thoughts begin to meet
like two colors that meet and run together
on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.
It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer
tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.
They stand packed and waiting very near,
a mob of people with blank faces.


The Name”:

I grow sleepy during the car journey and I drive in under the trees at the side of the road. I curl up in the back seat and sleep. For how long? Hours. Dusk has fallen.

Suddenly I’m awake and don’t know where I am. Wide awake, but it doesn’t help. Where am I? WHO am I? I am something that wakens in a back seat, twists about in panic like a cat in a sack. Who?

At last my life returns. My name appears like an angel. Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows (as in the Leonora Overture) and the rescuing footsteps come down the overlong stairway. It is I! It is I!

But impossible to forget the fifteen-second struggle in the hell of oblivion, a few meters from the main road, where the traffic drives past with its lights on.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

YEARNINGS

        Most of us accept that we have needs and most of our needs are present in our relationships.  A need often finds form, is carried in our wishes and yearnings.   So, why is it so difficult to express our yearnings to the other.   Often shame becomes the basic obstacle to expressing our wishes and yearnings.  Part of the meaning of shame is that we do not belong to the group, that the group has shunned us, has thrown us out of the circle as not acceptable.  So, to feel shame about a yearning has several sources.  One source is from experiences growing up, for example, when a yearning was ridiculed by the other.   Another source is that a yearning points to an absence, something missing, which is yearned for - for example, the yearning to feel wanted and desired, or the yearning to be chosen, picked.   To acknowledge an absence to the other is a most vulnerable moment, because at that moment we own our need for the other.  We own that we feel incomplete, we are not just independent entities, but also dependent persons.  Sometimes in that vulnerable moment, the other can feel superior to the person giving voice to his/her yearnings, and hence can transform the moment into one of power and submission or ridicule.    On the other hand a deep bond can develop if each can acknowledge needs of each other.