Getting fixed.

This isn’t Part 2 of this post, yet.

But in this other post (the one I wrote while spinning my wheels trying to write Part 2 of that post), I got into a cool conversation with Maggie about the different approaches to therapy.

I think about therapy as either behavior-focused (for example cognitive-behavior therapy), or soul-focused (how I experience jungian analysis). But these aren’t official definitions or anything, it’s even possible I made up those terms.

Anyway, I have seen a lot of therapists.

For most of the beginning of my life I felt broken, as if there was something fundamentally wrong with me and I would never be happy.

I went to therapy like I would go to a car mechanic. I wanted a diagnosis of the problem and a plan for solving it. I wanted a time-and-materials cost estimate.

I wanted to be fixed.

Behavior-focus
The rational approach works so well for a lot of other things. You go to an expert for answers. A consultant for an action-plan.

But using my conscious mind to decide things and break my bad habits and get happy already wasn’t working.

So I spent a lot of time wondering whether my therapists were right. Because how could they be right if it wasn’t fixing everything? There must be a different answer.

I usually ended up feeling even more broken. And just-ed a lot.

Soul-focus
The only thing that worked for me was doing a complete end-run around my conscious mind. Basically coming in sideways.

I sort of by accident ended up going to an analyst who started asking me about very different things.

What did I dream last night?

What can’t I stop thinking about?

Which on the surface can kind of seem like a waste of time, wheel-spinning at $150 per hour. My cynical, rational mind was rolling its eyes during the whole thing (which was good, I think that’s how we snuck past it).

But it was comforting to me because it wasn’t right or wrong, it just was. I got to turn off all the cogitating and theorizing I was doing, and just answer the questions. I didn’t know what these things meant yet, but at least I knew they were real. They were pieces of my truth in that moment.

They were clues. I simply had no other way to access my reality underneath conscious thought.

I didn’t know how to turn off my brain and just exist.

Therapy taught me how to do that.

Eventually, some deep healing took place. I was able to open up a connection with my soul. It took a long time, and it sounds kind of trite and obvious now, but what ended up “fixing” me was really and truly accepting that there wasn’t anything to fix in the first place.

That weird shit you think about that you think no one else does? It’s not something to dismiss, or wish away, or try to change about yourself. That’s your in.

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