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.