Finding your way back to yourself

This blog is about the reasons why we could choose therapy for ourselves.

Therapy is about more than understanding our life patterns.

In therapy, we can work to reclaim ourselves, bringing ourselves closer to the person we were born to be.

Let me explain.

We often approach therapy with a focus on understanding our thoughts and changing our behaviours. And these are good goals.

But beneath the surface of our thinking and acting is the internal world of our emotions, arguably our deepest and most complex side. 

As newborns, we all arrive into a particular family. We could not choose the people who raised us. Sometimes, our parents did not meet our emotional needs. As small children, there was little we could do about this.

Childhood adversity includes not just the things that happened to us that shouldn’t have: like trauma.

It also includes what was missing, that we needed, such as a parent’s loving interest in us.

Childhood adversity doesn’t just leave us with painful memories.

It forms a root within us from which deep-seated emotional patterns, called "schemas", start to grow.

Schemas are deeply-felt emotional “truths”, rooted in our early experiences. We can sometimes “hear” the voice of our little self within our schemas (e.g. in thoughts like “I’m bad”, “Nobody cares about me” or “I’m all alone”).

Living with unhealed schemas is like navigating life whilst dragging an invisible weight. It’s there all the time, pulling us down. The emotional toll can be huge.

A journey into schema therapy offers a different path, however.

Schema therapy provides the safety to explore deeply-ingrained emotional patterns as they show up in our life.

And offering our inner "Little Self” what was most needed in our early years can be one of the most emotionally-powerful aspects of schema therapy.

The journey isn't easy, of course.

Confronting deeply ingrained emotional patterns is difficult, sometimes painful.

However, I think the journey is worth doing.

Ultimately, embarking on schema therapy is a commitment to our own emotional well-being.

We all deserve to process our past. We all deserve to build a future where we are no longer dictated to by old wounds.

Schema therapy is about finding our way back to ourselves, not just intellectually, but on an emotional level. It is about becoming who we were born to be.

If this resonates with you, and you’d like to get in touch with me, please use the button below.

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