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THE GOALS OF THERAPY


Therapy cannot make us happy every day, but its benefits are tangible nevertheless. After a course of therapy, we will stand to feel substantially freer. We will realise that what we had believed to be our inherent personality was really just a position we had crouched into to deal with the prevailing atmosphere. Having taken a measure of the true present situation, we may accept that there could be other, sufficiently safe, ways for us to be. We had learnt to be ashamed and silent, but the therapist’s kindness and attention encourages us to be less disgusted by ourselves and less furtive around our needs. Having once voiced our deeper fears and wishes, they can become slightly easier to bring up again with someone else. There may be an alternative to silence. We can be more compassionate. Inevitably, in the course of therapy, we realise how much we were let down by certain people in the past. A natural response might be blame. But the eventual, mature reaction, building on an understanding of how our flaws arose, will be to interpret their harmful behaviour as a consequence of their own disturbance. The people who caused our primal wound almost invariably didn’t mean to do so; they were themselves hurt and struggling to endure. We can develop a sad but more compassionate picture of a world in which sorrows and anxieties are blindly passed down the generations. The insight is not only true to experience; holding it in mind will mean there is less to fear. Those who wounded us were not superior, impressive beings who knew our special weaknesses and justly targeted them. They were themselves frantic, damaged creatures trying their best to cope with the private sorrows that are part of every life.

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