The journey of healing and recovery can be circuitous. You may have heard me talk before about how when I first started therapy I thought I’d be there for about 6 months, then I’d be done and life would be good. I was there for a particular reason and once that was figured out, all would be OK.
Of course, that’s not how it works. The process is just that, a process, and it’s much more layered and nuanced than moving from point A to point B.
When I think of a healing journey, therapy in particular, I think of it in three primary parts. Many people spend most, if not all, of their time in therapy in Parts 1 and 2 and that’s beneficial. But I believe there’s a Part 3 where deeper healing is experienced.
Let me tell you more about each part.
Part 1: Something gets you to therapy
Something made you finally pick up the phone or send an email to a therapist:
Your anxiety felt unbearable.
You were overextended because you could never say no.
You started to wonder if you might struggle with addiction.
Your feelings about your mother got increasingly complicated.
You felt ready to talk about a secret you’ve held for decades.
Your healing journey starts first with settling into the fact that you’re in a therapist’s office. Maybe you feel some relief, maybe you’re scared to death, often both at once. It takes time to start to build trust with your therapist, trust that it’s OK to do this, getting used to the idea of being vulnerable.
You get settled into the process and start dealing with whatever got you in the door. If your world is super unsettled, you need help getting your feet underneath you. Aside from you and your therapist building a safe connection, this is the main point of Part 1.
You start to come out of intensity or crisis mode, you can breathe a little more deeply. You likely have talked some about your childhood experiences but haven’t done much with them at this point.
Part 2: Looking at the root(s) of what got you into therapy
Things are feeling more settled so there’s room to start talking more about your experiences in childhood. You may start to gain a better understanding that the trauma you experienced back then still impacts you today.
Your therapist helps you connect some dots about why you do what you do.
No wonder I can never use my voice with my boss, her anger and intensity is just like my grandmother.
I thought there was something wrong with me that I hardly ever feel emotion, but it makes sense now that I understand that I had to shut my feelings down at a young age.
No wonder I date arrogant men who are dismissive, it feels familiar because of my dad.
You start to see your childhood experiences more clearly. That “spanking” you got with a dowel rod, was actually physical abuse. The sexual experience you had when you were 10 wasn’t about exploration, it was abuse. Your mom confiding to you about her struggles with your dad felt overwhelming, not connecting.
Threads of your story that you didn’t know were there start to come to light. I saw this in my own therapy. When I first started therapy, I went for one particular reason and I had no idea all that was there. But as the process unfolded I realized I had way more going on from childhood that I needed to deal with.
As all of this is happening you start to get more comfortable with being vulnerable (at least with your therapist). You may have started experiencing your emotions in a way that you hadn’t before.
And you start to feel better and see changes in your life. What got you in the door may no longer feel as overwhelming and you have more understanding about what the heck was going on. What a relief!
And this is good. We all need that.
But this is often when people leave therapy because things are so much better. And why wouldn’t they? Things are better, the world is no longer upside down. Sure, there’s still stuff in my past but why go there?
Here’s why: there are things that you’ll keep bumping up against over and over again until you do the deeper healing work on the root of them.
If there are patterns, behaviors, beliefs that you’ve done good work on in therapy but they still keep coming up, it likely means that you need the work that happens in Part 3 of the therapy journey. That’s where deep and lasting healing happens.
Part 3: Doing the healing work on the root(s) of what got you into therapy
This is the part I feel most strongly about and deeply connected to. It’s also the part that sometimes gets missed. I’ve experienced this in my life and I know what’s possible.
And I see it every day with my clients and those that work with me in Intensives. What happens over time as you walk into places in your story long ago hidden is powerful.
In Part 3 you not only give intellectual assent to what happened to you as a child, you start to connect with the felt experience. Saying out loud that when you were five years old your mom used to throw you across the room is a big deal, and an important part of the work.
But imagine what it would be like if you truly let it sink in that a five-year-old is very little and vulnerable. If you let yourself connect with that five-year-old part of you and what it was like to be thrown across the room. The fear, shame, sense of betrayal, confusion, sadness, the fact that your mom was the one doing this to you—all of that is part of the experience that has stayed with you for decades. It’s what we hold deep in our hearts and bodies.
That deeply held experience creates a sense of fear that you carry around in the world, a shame that tells you there’s something wrong with you, that this was your fault. And then you operate in the world from that place. That shame shapes how you see yourself, how you feel about yourself, how you show up in the world, how you show up in relationships.
So even though this happened to you as a five-year-old, you carry the impact into your adult life. And talking about it alone is only a part of the healing process.
I want to be clear that this part of the process isn’t about going backwards or reliving, it’s about moving forward in healing.
And it’s hard. Sometimes it feels excruciating. At times you may wonder why in the world you put yourself through this.
But then you get a glimpse of a depth of freedom that you never knew existed. And so you keep doing the work.
The nuances of healing work
These different parts of therapy don’t unfold linearly or within a certain time frame. It’s much more nuanced than that and dependent on many factors that vary from person to person.
Take my therapy journey as an example. I started therapy in my early 20s, and for the next several years I did a lot of Parts 1 and 2 type of work. It was really helpful and I experienced healing and change.
But in my mid-30s I started working with a therapist who walked with me in the Part 3 type of work and over the years I experienced healing that I never thought possible. But here’s another layer – even doing Part 3 work, I went back into Parts 1 and 2 at times either because of something happening in my life or what I was working on.
That 6 months of therapy I was going to do when I was younger turned into a decades long healing journey that continues today even though I haven’t been in weekly Part 3 therapy work that whole time. What that work gave me wasn’t just healing in the moment though, it invited me to a way of being—open, curious, self-reflective—that lets healing keep happening as things come up.
My hope for you is that you’ll find your way to your own type of Part 3 experience. Because I know what kind of healing is possible, and I want that for you.
Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash