It’s one thing to accept and experience the truth of yourself in the privacy of your solitude ~ NOT interacting with others. It’s a whole different matter when you try to take that same humanity into relationship and bump up against someone’s grumpy mood or your own unmet expectations.
In many healing arts models, practitioners BEGIN working with clarity about the focus for change. Over time, this clarity devolves as the conversations become more rambling or real change is less evident or not as quick as both practitioner and client had hoped.
With AAIT, having clarity about the “change contract” is part of almost every session.
The conditioned self can be sneaky and oh so self righteous — full of justifications for its existence. We feel it when we are in a suboptimal state of being or triggered. This idea of being triggered is crucial. For when we are triggered, we are reactive, not responsive. Our reactions don’t fully feel within our control and/or are not congruent with our real self.
“I’m so much more of who I am and so much less of who I think I should be.” This is the news that greeted me when talking with a client recently. This kind of news lights me up as a therapist. It makes oh so clear how valuable our work is. Do you know how valuable your work is?
As a young therapist, I was not completely comfortable saying “I’m a therapist.” It felt much more congruent to stand in “I practice psychotherapy.” It’s a practice, the more we do it, the better we get. Practice implies a deep engagement with the subject of practice. Practice is distinct from work.