We live in challenging times where a person’s experience is diminished, invalidated and destroyed. This tragic traumatization has become common in the present world. We can say that we have moved towards increase in dehumanization. Any natural experience that is traumatic does not have space to be held. For example, a separation in a relationship can create havoc, emotional turmoil and extreme instability in a person’s life. This requires that for some time we have to give up our usual responsibilities and expectations from social life, and grieve the loss. Sit with the wound and allow it to heal. Remember and mourn the loss of the person. This is only one kind of loss. There could be many forms of loss that leads to trauma. Such as emotional neglect in childhood and feeling afraid of being abandoned in relationships. All these experiences want us to slow down and pause, and silently grieve as we can find our sense of self again.
Psychotherapy is a space between therapist and client which allows us to look at your experience that brings obstacle in becoming human. The experience of child abuse, grief, anxiety, depression, terror, paranoid, loss of loved one are some of the examples of challenges that life throws at us. Untangling these experiences from frozen state helps you in your development and growth.
Psychotherapy is therefore qualitatively growth-oriented process that can enable you to meet your psychological, emotional and social difficulties as they are. It is in midst of these difficulties that healing resides in the form of treasure, and we access it through insight in the psychotherapeutic process.
Symptoms are manifestation of deeper underlying experience, perhaps traumatic or painful, that we work at to bring true healing. The goal of therapy may not be to fix the symptoms in short term, though in long term the symptoms will subside by approaching underlying experiences more holistically.
As we sit with deeper aspects of you, we engage with the traumas that have affected you and shaped you. We learn to go to the ground of you and meet all the bodily sensations and feelings, to finally grow from whole sense of self.
Pankaj Suneja 