“I’m burnt out,” we tell our friends. And, to anyone who will listen, we repeat our story. “My life is a mess. I’m tired of it.”
It can be difficult to admit how stuck and blind we are. How little of the whole picture we can see. How rigid we become in that limited view. How adamant we are that our slice of reality is the only reality that exists.
My job is to expand those horizons. To expose you to different types of inner experiences, and to help you remove the layers and layers of shackles. To help you find freedom of movement and space so you can breathe.
Many of my clients have talked about being able to see things that they couldn’t see before therapy. One said that it was like they went to the doctor and had their vision corrected.
And I think it does indeed work like that.
Which is both exciting… and a little scary.
Because when we’re growing up, parents’ narcissistic needs can overshadow those of their children. The child has no other self — so they both adapt to and repel their parents’ vision.
Or they don’t realize that they haven’t formed a separate identity. They buy into the belief that parental views about themselves and the world are their own unique vision — when really all they see is the view their parents harbored and cultivated within them.
It all comes unglued when you realize the obedience your parents needed from you. That how your parents treated you is an indication of their own primitive needs. Perhaps your parents could never allow themselves to see you as a person apart.
“Now I can see the whole panorama,” you find yourself saying one day, after sticking with inner reconnaissance for a few weeks. Or months. Or years…
And with that panorama comes the recognition: not only is there other stuff outside the peripheral field to discover, there are also other people. That’s right: other people exist, with thoughts and feelings and viewpoints all their own. They have whole other realities over there!
When you learn to connect with yourself, you learn to connect with others, too.