What Is Therapy? Contd.

In this post I will continue my analogy to explain therapy I began last week. If you haven’t seen yet, check it out so you have some context for this post.

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Therapy is like rewiring an old home. To update the wiring, there needs to be an understanding of both the old and new wiring. This means taking down the walls to expose the wiring, understanding the set up, and then there’s the job of rewiring. All this has to be done in an environment that’s set up to ensure the worker’s safety.

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Just like when rewiring an old home, it’s important that strategies be in place so the layout of the old patterns can be learned in a space of safety. Working in a space of safety is an ongoing process. The work requires taking a look behind the “walls” - the things we have in place to protect us in life. This is careful, rough, and sometimes messy work! It’s important to be prepared with safety measures in place, for this, for exploring the old processes behind the walls to understand the reasons they were assembled this way in the first place, and for considering the new, preferred process and assembly. In an old home, attempting to uninstall and/or bypass old wiring while adding in the new wiring, without an understanding of the old process, could result in unexpected electrical fires, being electrocuted, etc. Just like in an old home, understanding the assembly itself is an important part of therapy, since triggering will occur. Having safety measures in place doesn’t mean that triggering won’t occur, however, it does help in working through the inevitable shocks, to feel less jolted by them, and to use them as informative pieces of information to help move forward through the process.  

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In addition to updating the old wiring, perhaps you want to add new light switches and a furnace. In the meantime, while the electricity is turned off to the house, you may have a generator in place to power your lighting, heating, and any needed tools. Eventually, the old wiring is addressed and the new wiring is put in place so the process of turning on a new light, for example, takes less effort than setting up the generator everytime. 

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The generator and connected resources are like the external resources we use in therapy - skills, strategies, tools, even the therapist. Eventually, as we come to understand our old processes and feel less triggered into old reactions, we can start to incorporate the things we’ve learned in sessions with less thoughtful effort. Just like flipping on the new light switch, the process becomes much quicker and more automatic. And just like rewiring a house, therapy is a lot of work and takes time! It’s messy and hard, but things are so much easier when you can finally just flip the switch.