Our parents’ views rarely stick out in our minds. Instead, they merge with our own; they lose their identifying labels and become sides of everyday consciousness, indistinguishable from what we more broadly want and believe. Yet we should try to reverse the process of absorption and recover some distance between ourselves and impulses and attitudes that may bear no relation to our healthier aspirations. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
At the heart of many mental traumas is an early experience of abandonment. Someone, when we badly needed them, was not present and their neglect has thrown us off balance ever since. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
Loving parents know that the minds of little children are similarly filled with anxiety-inducing and sometimes peculiar questions: Is there a tiger under the bed? What happens if one of the trees comes into the room and takes me away? What if someone laughs at me at school? ....
But the properly loving response is to take the worry as seriously as its progenitor does and address it head on, without scoffing or denying the scale of the concern. We might get out a pad of paper and a pen and run through all the many anxieties. It doesn’t matter if this is the first or the fifteenth time we have done so. Love gives us the patience to enter imaginatively into the other’s worried mind and to try to settle it by sensible examination of what there might be to fear. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
But the properly loving response is to take the worry as seriously as its progenitor does and address it head on, without scoffing or denying the scale of the concern. We might get out a pad of paper and a pen and run through all the many anxieties. It doesn’t matter if this is the first or the fifteenth time we have done so. Love gives us the patience to enter imaginatively into the other’s worried mind and to try to settle it by sensible examination of what there might be to fear. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
We are granted the right to question the sanity of our early caregivers and, in the process, to recover some of our own. We may have inherited a script from childhood that dictates that we should only ever fall in love with people who leave us emotionally unfulfilled, or that we should start to panic that we will be attacked and humiliated the moment we do well professionally. Our script may tell us that no one will understand if we level a complaint against them or if we betray anyone on whom we have come to depend.-A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
We should learn to see that we are essentially worried all the time about something. The focus may shift, but what is constant is our insecurity about existence. It is in such situations that a therapist may make a hugely useful intervention, pointing out that the way we worry about the future is in fact telling us a huge amount about our past. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
What we are doing in the process is exchanging the pain of remembering the difficult past for a sense of foreboding around the future. The catastrophe we fear is going to happen has already happened. So sealed off are our memories, we project them forward, where they greet us as apprehensions of what is to come.-A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
Returning to health can involve learning to go back to the child we once were, seeing ourselves in all our early helplessness and confusion, and bringing ourselves the benefit of adult compassion and insight. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
This deceptively simple idea latches on to a powerful fantasy: that the older us could go back to help the younger us. How extraordinary it would be if we could give our comparatively frail and bereft tiny self the benefit of our adult strength, experience, poise, and confidence.....
We would be much more able now to navigate what we endured with such pain then. We would tell ourselves not to worry, we would guarantee that we were lovable and precious, we would hold ourselves through the long nights. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
We would be much more able now to navigate what we endured with such pain then. We would tell ourselves not to worry, we would guarantee that we were lovable and precious, we would hold ourselves through the long nights. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
The priority is therefore to go back and, just like Otsuka in her project, stand beside our younger selves in all their difficulties. We should slip into our bed the night we were sobbing after having been shouted at. We should take ourselves to school and sit at the desk next to ours and tell ourselves what we so needed to hear but never did. We should stand up to particular adults and make the speeches we were too inarticulate to utter. Our lost sad child is still inside us and won’t let us rest until we have been able to witness and appease them. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
The hallmark of modernity has been its impatience with anything that might set limits on human achievement. Whereas past ages resigned themselves to offering modest destinies to most of their citizens, modernity has insisted that everyone—whatever their background or families of origin—should be capable of realizing the most stellar feats. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
Forwarded from Encounter_HUMAN (bamii)
It can be easy to wonder for too long what books and ideas might be for. Their highest calling, which inspires what follows, may simply be to try to lend us—at our very worst moments—the strength and clarity to endure.- A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
Hello , I'm glad you are here . Whether you stayed internationaly or the channel got lost in the mountains of other texts ,group chats and other channels. It's been hide and seek since 2022 on here .. I apologize for that .. my life has changed in so many ways in the past years.. I feel a little like a different person .. life after college hit me hard .. like the unexpected fall you feel when your asleep (panic and a mini nightmare) . For an over achiever perfectionist and some one with not enough self love it's been quite a rough ride but a very rewarding one . I have grown to love myself a little more and collected acellades to prove my self worth , I'm working on not trying to buy my place in the world but it's a journey ..
I can't say if I'm back for real this time , and guarantee that it's not longer hide and seek ..the past few weeks have been hard .. and lots of crying .. but I have been longing for home .. and the feeling I used to get from Encounter Human... I no longer have time to read books because of my many commitments .. but I will like to share what's on my mind ,my thoughts .. share my plans and my view of the world .. I reminder when I first started the channel around 7 years ago I only used to share photos with quotes .. I would probably start the same way now ..