Therapy: a metaphor in three parts

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Therapy: a metaphor in three parts


Therapy has been so pivotal to really understanding my inner landscape, the dark corners I do not discuss. My psychiatrist observed that being in active therapy really softens the high walls around me and helps to modulate my defences so that the emotions and thoughts I have are actually accessible and not simply shoved down.

But being vulnerable also raises all the issues I have been ignoring. The steady creep of somatic symptoms have frightened me but they remind me that shoving the issues down haven’t made them go away or even made them easier to deal with. Instead they wind around each other, a ball of tension and grief.

And what tensions, my psychologist asks, exist to keep that ball formed and what might happen if it was taken apart? She asks in a way that is gentle but persistent and I pause to consider the idea of seeing those tensions unformed, individual and, dare I say, manageable? If each elastic tension that pulls me in all directions at once, just...can’t...? The power of that tension is then lost, isn’t it?

And harmful things, the ones I do to myself, shift to a different place. One where I can see them for what they are, individually, just spots of regained control and no longer subject to victimization or unsafe places. I can choose to see them, as they are and not as they once were. And that feels like it could be triumphant. 

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