Because ALL psychological, developmental, emotional, and spiritual injuries have emerged from relationships; it stands to reason that they must be metabolized within the relational field.
In the context of therapy, it’s imperative that the therapist and client take the emotional risk of sincerely entering a relationship with one another. Therapy clients are often ready to expose the tender nerves of relational rupture, just to find in the best-case scenarios that it’s met with professional empathy (a way that therapists and other caregivers stay emotionally safe and distant), and in the worst-case scenarios, with emotional abandonment.
The truth of this work for the therapist, is that it takes courage. The courage to allow our hearts to break over and over again. That’s the bodhisattva path. It’s a path of surrendering to the risks that love asks us to make for the benefit of others. There’s nowhere to hide. We are confronted with the devastation and delight of the human condition, and we’re confronted with ourselves.
For therapy to be a new and healing relational experience, the client and therapist must sit parallel, eye-to-eye, as friends on the path who bravely meet the whole of the human experience together. Neither of us experts. Both of us trembling in our shaky but oh so very alive rawness. THIS is the relational healing people need. Not someone to fix it. Not someone who knows. Just a friend who can be in it, who is brave, who will commit to no longer abandoning grief, shame, love, fear, anger, confusion, joy, and all their emissaries.
So much of the pain in this world is the pain of abandoning ourselves; the impulse to just get out of there when it gets uncomfortable, and that abandonment is where our suffering begins. It’s where the shift from a tender rawness turns into suffering. An empathetically attuned friend such as a therapist provides us grounding in the present moment, rewiring our sensitive nervous systems from one that is shaped by empathetic failure to one in which we can begin to find safety in our bodies, in relationship to one another, and within our communities and the world at large.
THIS! This is the care that we all deserve.