My therapist is perceptive. She challenges me. She keeps wanting to talk about what’s happening in the room between us. In the here and now. The moments I go quiet, the moments I withdraw, the moments when she feels an emotion arising in the field, or senses it in her own body. The moments I am lost in my story and a million miles away from her.
She attends to the minutiae of the interaction, she tracks what’s happening in the field, and she doesn’t let me hide.
She sees the patterns of how I relate, and she calls me out on them. Gently. Kindly. But still.
I’ll be honest, I sometimes find it excruciating.
I find myself thinking:
Do we have to do that?
Can’t I just tell you what’s hard in my life?
Can’t I just come here and share what’s challenging in my other relationships—my friendships, my marriage, my family, my work? And you nod empathically and tell me how to handle them better?
My resistance to looking at the here and now speaks volumes. My resistance is exactly how I know I need to go there.
These are the conversations I often struggle to have in my friendships, my marriage, my family.
These are the conversations we struggle to have as a collective.
It doesn’t help that I had a British upbringing. We signed up to the unwritten rule that we do not talk about the elephant in the room. We can talk about all kinds of hard topics, but we resolutely do not talk about what’s happening between us in the here and now. We smile politely, pretend all is OK, then go and offload to someone else about what just happened.
But I recognise that this way of relating is limited. That this way of relating keeps me at a distance from some of the people in my life. It keeps my real self concealed behind a mask of acceptability. It’s a form of fawning and people-pleasing. It keeps my healthy anger and hurt locked away inside a straitjacket. Ultimately, it can be a lonely and disconnected way to relate to the world. And yet, by and large, it’s our cultural norm. At least, where I grew up in England, and where I live now in New Zealand. I can’t speak for all cultures.
I recognise that the path my therapist is trying to lead me down is where the deeper layer of healing lies. The true healing is not in her giving me a strategy that I go out and apply in my day-to-day life. There is a role for this in therapy, of course, but at this stage, I have enough strategies to sink the Titanic. Another strategy is not going to transform my life. Learning how to show up with more honesty and authenticity in my relationships just might.
In a recent session, she invited me to voice the hidden judgements and criticisms of her I harbour in my mind. I froze like a deer in the headlights. She was not wrong that I’ve had them, but the idea of saying them out loud felt sacrilegious. That’s just not what good girls do. It felt like dangerous territory, where I risked judgement, rejection, or worse, an angry and hostile response. My rational mind knew that wouldn’t be the case. She’s a professional, and she can handle it. She has her own supports in place. But still, it felt risky.
It took me another week to be able to respond to her question. To voice some of the moments that had not quite landed well, where I had not quite felt met. But when I voiced this, something transformed. I realised I could express these things with care, and that they could be received with thoughtfulness. When the sky didn’t fall in, and the ground didn’t open up and swallow me, and she simply nodded and took the feedback on board, the level of connection in the room expanded. I felt seen, I felt heard, I felt met, I felt trusted. I felt more energy in the room.
The therapy room is a microcosm of life. What shows up there is what we grapple with in our daily interactions. What’s different is that it’s a place where we can slow things right down. Where we can shine a light on what happens moment by moment in our interactions. Where we can recognise our patterns and our moments of reactivity and understand them more clearly. There is nowhere else quite like it.
Sometimes it makes me squirm, sometimes it makes me sweat, sometimes it makes me freeze, but as I work my way through these moments and come to understand more closely the triggers that show up for me in the interpersonal space, I come to know myself more deeply and to understand the places where I get stuck in daily life and relationships. The relationship feels more real, more alive, more intimate, and I recognise that this kind of relating is what makes for a richer and fuller experience of life.
So, I’m taking some risks in my therapy. I’m taking risks that I need to bring into my other relationships. Slowly, incrementally, that’s beginning to happen, and the practice ground of the therapy room serves as a bridge. It’s gentle, it’s encouraging, and it’s daring me to go places I haven’t been before. And that is a gift worth showing up for.
Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear whether this resonates with you. How do you navigate talking about what’s happening in your relationships? And what have been the most impactful moments in your own therapy, if you’ve done some? I always appreciate the comments and conversation that happen here.
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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.
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