What if ‘this is just how I am’ became this is how I’ve learned to be?

Diving Deep, Karen Nimmo 2023. Painting of a woman diving deep to find the treasure belonging to her young self.

I’m offering an open day of free 30 minute introductory sessions on 14 March and thought it might be helpful to flesh out in a bit more detail how I work and how I think long term therapy can help.

I want to start by sharing something of my own journey, and how I know something about this process from the inside out.  I have been in my own deep therapy process for around 12 years.  In this time, I have left behind a career that looked great on paper but often left me feeling empty inside and stressed.  I retrained and established my business as a therapist, become a mother and discovered an artist-self inside of me that has lain dormant since early childhood.  My closest relationships have deepened and become more satisfying and nourishing.  My life is not now free from difficulty, or immune to the struggles of being a person, but I can be with these realities in different ways. I truly believe none of this would have been possible were it not for the emotional and psychological holding I have experienced in my own therapy.  And it is from that starting point that I offer this work, not as a separate ‘expert’, protected by theories and ideas, but as a fellow human, on my own journey.

The depth of my own inner work means I am not afraid of your big or messy feelings, your confusions, uncertainties and not-knowings.   You may want someone to tidy it all up and help package it away.  I don’t do that.  I believe there is wisdom and growth to be found in being with the complexity and the mess, and not running away from it.  Often, there’s something trying to call attention here, that we can – together , with support – come to understand.  This could be a call to change something about your life situation, or a deeper call to befriend and integrate parts of yourself or your past experience that have been shut down and boxed away for a long time.

When I talk about integrating parts of yourself that are shut off, I mean things like particular feelings and emotions, e.g. so called ‘negative emotions’, like anger, sadness or fear.  Or, needs that arise from our shared human vulnerability like the needs to depend on others, for reassurance and care and to be heard.  Shutting down any emotion or need habitually can lead to feelings of depression and anxiety, as that energy remains inside of you, unexpressed.  Either clogging things up like a blogged drain or lead filled suitcase, or constantly whirring, looking for resolution, like an always ‘on’ feeling. 

Its not uncommon to learn early on in life that to get on means becoming solidly independent, to not need much if anything and to keep it all together.  This strategy may have some usefulness in building an adult life, and, at some point, can become exhausting, isolating and anxiety and anger inducing.  Feelings of chronic resentment can also be a feature when the capacity to ask for help or say no have been underdeveloped.

In a long-term therapy process, your unique story that may have contributed to these ways of being can emerge, along with the implicit associations and beliefs you have developed over a life time that keep these patterns in place.  When I talk about associations and beliefs I don’t mean thoughts or values we are conscious of and would list in a questionnaire.  I mean something more like a reality prism through which you experience the world you are a part of.  A finely orchestrated sequence of felt responses, sensations, non-verbal thoughts, assumptions and behaviours that are the product of many repeated experiences (often in early life) that go together to lead people to say things like ‘its just how I am’ when talking about something difficult about how they experience life.  Or, ‘that’s just how life is’, when talking about a struggle with others or getting on in the world generally.

The potential of change and transformation in long term, depth psychotherapy, comes from sitting with this predicament of how we form meaning of our experience, in relationship with others, and over time with care, experiment with different options.  Experimentation can happen in the therapeutic relationship where the risk can be taken to show and share something that has been locked up for a life time and discover that the world hasn’t ended in the process (I don’t say this lightly, and know from personal experience the existential terror that can come along with opening up to a previously forbidden emotion or desire).  Life outside of sessions can also become part of the laboratory where we can challenge our assumptions and try a new way of being and see what happens.

Over time and lots of repetition, these new experiences of allowing more of ourselves and our experience into relationship, in therapy, in relationship with ourselves and others, can transform the ground of our being.  I think of the ground of our being something like the basic foundation of our experience and who we are.  A bit like an operating system on a computer, it sits there running all the programmes and normally we don’t pay much attention to it.  Unless something starts to go wrong that troubleshooting guides can’t help. 

If there’s been something from early life that has communicated a message consistently of ‘you are too much’, ‘your feelings are a problem’, or ‘you have to be a certain way so I [an important other] can be ok’ the ground of being becomes preoccupied with managing experience rather than just being it.  Feelings get squashed down or turned into anxiety.  Life becomes about performing a way of being that is acceptable, and divorced from the aliveness of authentic feeling and desire.  The ground of being taking on a belief of ‘there’s something wrong with me’.  

If there was something chaotic going on in the home, like alcoholism, violence, uncontained and regularly unresolved conflict, attention gets diverted away from the self and focused on scanning the environment.  Small children don’t know its nothing to do with them and in an effort to feel in control and to distract from the pain of powerlessness may come to think they can pre-empt these scary moments by being pleasing, caretaking the emotions of the adults and blaming themselves for what’s happening. In this situation, the ground of being is oriented towards trying to stay safe and anticipating threat. 

These are just two examples of how early life experience can shape who we feel we are and how we step into life.  Usually this is all running the background out of awareness, influencing our responses, choices and what we feel is possible.  This is why I offer long term depth psychotherapy.  I work with people who have tried all kinds of things to feel better and to make a change but feel like the same problems come round and round again and again.

The difficulties I’m describing have their root in relational wounding, trauma in relationship that isn’t necessarily one big event but more like the dripping tap in the background.  One of the sad things about relational trauma is that it can leave us so unaware of our relational and emotional needs that we end up on endless searches in the wrong direction as we try to address the symptoms of these core difficulties.  This can include endless cycles of dieting, ‘detox’ and weight gain in an attempt to manage emotional pain through food.  Endless attempts to get everything done or ‘sorted out’ can indicate a workaholism driven by an unmet need to feel good enough or in control when inside feels like chaos.  The social media addiction that offers the false promise of connection that fuels comparison and disconnect from real life experience.  Endless appointments with doctors, and perhaps investment in body work or other therapies to address chronic pain and tension in the body or digestive issues with no seeming organic cause. This is not a criticism of any of these approaches, but an attempt to highlight that a focus on managing a symptom of relational wounding doesn’t tend to bring about the shift we long for; the weight loss, the energy, the connection, the feeling of freedom of pain.

Life events such as a bereavement, redundancy, becoming a parent, aging or menopause can also be situations where a vulnerability in ourselves might emerge, precipitating feelings of breakdown or fragmentation as the established way of being is no longer workable.  These can be frightening moments, and great opportunities to attend to unprocessed feelings from the past and find new life in what might feel like the wreckage of what was.

In a world full of quick fixes and hacks for this that and the next thing my offer of a long-term psychotherapy process feels counter cultural.  I make no promises for what the outcome will be or how quickly we will get there.  I cannot offer certainty.  But I can and do offer a steady presence.  Deep interest and curiosity.  Engagement and active participation, including challenge when it seems necessary and useful.  The container we build together has the potential to shift deeply how you experience yourself and world around you for a life of greater freedom and wholeness.

If this speaks to you and you would like to meet with me to explore further click here to sign up for a free intro session on the 14^th of March.