Am I Getting better?
In therapy, you learn a lot about how the therapeutic conversation works, what the implicit rules are, and how the counsellor guides answers, usually in a way that makes you answer yourself. This, of course, is the most effective way we work through our problems in our own way. If the counsellor provided all the answers, we wouldn’t have reached those conclusions through our own thoughts.
I had a session yesterday evening, and the conversation is still very fresh in my mind. I asked what I considered a loaded question, one that I feared would put my therapist on the spot. I asked her if I was getting better. In my mind, what I really wanted to know was how long I would feel frightened, anxious, and sad. Of course, not even the most qualified therapist can answer this with absolute certainty. Unless, of course, they couple up their skills with clairvoyance. My therapist had forgotten her crystal ball last night.
She did answer me, and her words have been a great comfort to me, such that I slept much better, and my dreams were very positive (this is a significant shift from the usual night terrors). In her answer, she described how far I had come in the four years of therapy. She reminded me of where I was a year ago and helped me to reflect on my past experiences. She also described the nervous system and how, over time, using carefully designed exercises, we can teach it to feel safe.
In the past, there have been many such exercises that I have learned and used in my healing journey. One of these is writing, journaling. Often, I am guided to write with my non-dominant hand because this engages both left and right sides of the brain, thus engaging with my inner child. I am not entirely certain of the science, which is what I pay my therapist for. She has recently explained that to move from panic, fear, terror, to a safer place in the mind, we have to start moving attention from the limbic centre to the more creative areas within the brain. It is more difficult, she says, to try and move straight from the primitive brain to the frontal (logic, thinking) part.
This lesson in neuroscience, albeit short, sweet, and basic, came after a question I asked of her. I described my difficulty managing the extreme fear, and the struggle I have trying to reassure the inner child, while experiencing her emotions. My therapist has already taught me that some of the bigger emotions, the more intense fear, often stem from the much younger parts of me. Yesterday I explained that I found it difficult trying to be two minds; one of the inner child seeking comfort from the abject fear, and the other, the adult self, reassuring her.
My therapist was able to provide much-needed advice. She suggested that I engage in an exercise where, as described above, I engage the creative parts of the brain, which then allow me to move out of the fight/flight centre (limbic). An example of this would be to soothe inner Grace, by visualisation, which included actively imagining balloons which I blow up, then watch as they rise and disappear into the sky. I visualise the fears and worries being these balloons. Alternatively, she suggested that I could physically draw these, using lots of colours, shapes and different pens.
The principle here is that while I am engaging in creativity, I am signalling my nervous system that worries can be released. The process also physiologically activates other parts of the brain, which disarms the fight/flight response. Think of all the advice we read about journaling our thoughts, free writing, and colouring. All these activities reinforce the same principle. I hadn’t realised until this point that my website is my very own platform for journaling and experienced a moment of pride. More than that, I realised that when others read my blogs, the activity of reading in itself is creative too, thus providing a way to reduce the fight/flight response.
So, in conclusion, asking a question of my therapist often gets redirected to me to answer, which is how healing and awareness increase. But my therapist did commit to an answer to whether I am getting better. She explained all the work we have done, all the techniques, the exercises, and the crises we worked through. This was my answer. She didn’t need to say yes or no. She just reflected to me what I was becoming, and for the first time, I recognised who was looking back.
