SELF-DEVELOPMENT THROUGH PSYCHOTHERAPY

SELF-DEVELOPMENT THROUGH PSYCHOTHERAPY

Working with a psychotherapist is one of the forms of receiving help in achieving personal maturity. Essentially, it represents an answer to the need for personal development – the need that we have on both, emotional and spiritual level.

In spite of the overall focus on learning, growth and development in life, the standard and classical social structures of education usually fail to encourage our emotional and spiritual development. Moreover, in our childhood we experience certain emotional difficulties, which we cannot handle in an adequate way at that stage of life. These difficulties represent the unfinished childhood business that we carry with ourselves through life.

Therefore, in working with a therapist we focus on what is common to all of us as human beings – on developing the certain parts of our personality that had no sufficient support when we were growing up. The reasons for this lack of support do not necessarily have to be connected with extremely traumatic experiences from childhood. Very often, the reasons lie in the fact that parents, in spite of their commitment to their children, cannot support their children in handling and resolving all of their emotional conflicts due to their own emotional and psychological immaturity. This is the reason for which all of those unresolved issues from our childhood become transferred to our adult life.

Our work as psychotherapists is based on a three-layer map of human psyche consisting of prepersonal, personal and transpersonal psychic areas. At the begging, a large portion of personal development deals with resolving the unfinished childhood business, i.e. unresolved emotional pains from prepersonal and early personal period.

How these unresolved childhood businesses manifest in us as adults? The subconscious painful emotions that were not adequately dealt with become suppressed not only in our psyche – they also get suppressed through the subtle energy bodies, all the way to the densest vibration – our physical body. In this way they form physical and energy blocks that W. Reich referred to as the body armour. This means that in our physical body, just as in our psyche, there are records of painful emotions from childhood that condition us in different ways.

In integrative psychotherapy, by engaging our bodies together with our emotional and psychological aspects, we achieve faster and long-lasting results in helping a person to resolve his/her internal conflicts and develop maturity in the parts that remained incomplete.

Completion in terms of psychotherapy refers to paying attention to every emotion that got stuck in the childhood or was blocked and could not have been experienced in full. Emotional blocks or traumas are created when a child, in experiencing the certain emotion, at the same time experiences pain or fear that block any subsequent experience of that emotion. As a consequence, the child withdraws from further experience, attempts to forget and separate him/herself from that emotion, which later on results in avoidance and suppression. In childhood, this process is instinctive, since the child has no capacity to think something through or to accept and consciously endure pain as in adulthood.

In the therapeutic process, we create space for an adult person to experience the blocked emotion through physical, emotional and mental aspect, to express what remained suppressed and to find a constructive way to complete this process by including the need for love and acceptance that was hidden in the suppressed emotion. When a person succeeds in mastering this task that he/she was unable to master as a child, this part of the therapist assistance and development is completed.

Therefore, the purpose of psychotherapy is to help the person in facing his/her unresolved painful emotions through experience, and to relive them and deal with them in the present, with capacity of an adult and in a more mature way.

Through the therapeutic process, the person finally experiences a positive experience as an answer to the pain from the childhood. In this way, he/she forms a capacity to deal with this emotion – on the level of our nervous system new synaptic connections are formed creating new positive neural pathways different from the ones created through the painful experience.

By repeating this experience in therapy, the person is able to establish a new pattern of reactions even on the level of the neural pathways. The process of resolving emotional situations from the childhood therefore represents a physical, energy-related and psychological process, which includes a simultaneous engagement of all of the levels involved.

In other words, through the therapeutic process the person attaches a new and constructive experience to the old destructive story, thus ending a vicious circle of their own pain. At the same time, they are entering into an extended experience of joy and satisfaction, followed by a free flow of energy and a resolution of their story.

The integrative psychotherapy includes working with the body, with the subtle bodies and with the psyche. It incorporates all of the important aspects of a human being. This is why the result is more complete and achieved faster than by working with only one, e.g. mental, aspect, where the energy bodies and the physical body are set aside.

In the integrative psychotherapy we use contact, movement, sound and breathing. These four aspects of the therapeutic process very quickly lead to a possibility for the person to come into contact with an authentic part of him/herself located underneath the seemingly adapted part of the ego, used as protection from the pain. In this way, the therapeutic process also involves deeper layers of our psyche, namely, the parts that cause various discomforts in our everyday life.

The integrative therapy may be helpful to anyone interested in helping themselves feel better, which includes the healing of the psychological wounds. At the same time, its scope is much wider and it helps anyone who would like to get deeper knowledge and feeling of themselves, and enable themselves to feel even more joy and meaning in their lives.

The experience of developing a new and positive relationship with yourself and others, which the person acquires in the course of therapy, becomes reflected in everyday life and relationships. The process of psychotherapy often brings insights into positive aspects of life and contacts with other people. Finally, it creates a possibility of accepting what others around us have to offer through their own positive emotions, and the recognition of such love from outside of ourselves and readiness to accept it in our hearts finally brings the feeling of completeness, happiness and satisfaction.

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