Friday 16 August 2013

Change can be pretty sneaky sometimes

This morning, I walked along a street that I haven’t walked along for a little while.  I used to walk that way to and from my psychotherapist’s house and for those three years, there had been a set of foundations ready to be built on in a vacant lot.  When I walked past today, there was a house!  Completely finished and ready for someone to move in.  I was so used to seeing this unattractive stretch of concrete that I was genuinely surprised that a house had miraculously appeared in my absence.  It felt odd and unexpected but I had to admit that the house was a lot more attractive and useful than the overgrown lot that was there before.  It set me to thinking about my own experience of change through psychotherapy and that of my clients too.  

Change quite often sneaks up on us.  It’s easy enough to identify the things we’d like to change but how that change actually comes about can sometimes feel like a bit of a mystery.  Like the house; it all happens when we aren’t looking.  This sense of change sneaking up on us is often described as an embodied change or shift.  It’s that point where we’ve stopped having to think about it and just do it instead.  It’s worth remembering that change can only come about through a process of learning.  New neural pathways need to be laid down and that takes time and practice; just in the same way that learning any other new skill does.  To begin with, it takes real effort to put new ways of being or relating into practice and that quite often means taking risks with how we are in relationship with other people.  The good news is that these risks can be mitigated within a therapeutic relationship.  Counsellors and psychotherapists are here for you to practice on.  Seriously, we don’t mind and any good counsellor or therapist will actively encourage it.  It’s the whole point of us being there with you.  

I would say that embodied change through counselling or psychotherapy happens something like this:
 

Together, you and your counsellor explore your experience; you begin to take the risk that your counsellor will accept you for who you are; then you begin the process of change by challenging your unhelpful ways of being through your relationship with your counsellor; eventually you begin to take these risks with other people; one day, you realise that this new way of being or relating doesn’t feel risky anymore and so that change has become embodied.
So, not so mysterious after all then.

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