What’s the point in therapy if it’s not me that’s broken?

The more I work with clients (and myself) and the more I reflect on the social context for their and my challenges the more I notice that it is not, in fact, us that are the problem. I’ve never really been of the belief that and of us need fixing but for a long time I was sucked into the idea that we have all of the answers within ourselves. ‘What’s wrong with that!?’ I hear you cry, ‘surely we do have all of the answers within ourselves?’ and from one perspective that’s completely true but doesn’t it depend what you mean by answers? And for that matter ourselves?

The idea that we have all of the answers within ourselves implies a question, a problem to be solved, something broken to be fixed. That firstly just isn’t true and secondly creates a whole lot of pressure. It can lead to beliefs like ‘this is all my responsibility’, ‘I need to find the answers’, and ‘there are some right answers and some wrong answers’. Stressful!

What I eventually came to realise is that, while we often do have more power than we realise to make changes to our lives and situations as well as to our perspectives at times, it is actually the world that is ‘broken’, the systems that we live within that are neither natural nor healthy. Trauma specialist Arille Schwartz says that rather than seeing ourselves as broken we are actually just ‘hurt and in need of care’ perhaps this would be a good way to see the world too.

Myself and my clients are usually responding in healthy and natural ways to unhealthy and unnatural situations. Due to the directions our development as a society has taken, this describes almost all situations from your workplace to your kids’ school to your gym. As Gabor Mate decribes in his book the Myth of Normal, these normalised but deeply unhealthy environments are the actual problem.

So if the world is so overwhelmingly broken, what in fact is ther role of therapy?

Well in individual therapy it’s to first give you the understanding that it’s not you. That comes with the joy of realising there’s nothing wrong with you and also the massive loss associated with all the times when someone said or implied that there was. There’s also the potential horror and overwhelm of looking around you and seeing what a mess we’re in. Therapy can help you process all of this while repeatedly coming back into your body, recognising you are safe in this moment and developing and strengthening the skills needed to live healthily in this world. Just this bit will make a huge difference in your life and the lives of those you meet. Making a healthy choice that honours your soul gives other people permission to do the same. The ripple effect can be enormous and living our truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Next comes group therapy. At Healing Womanhood this is our monthly online women’s circle. This is a space where we have room to do the processing in community amplifying its effects with the support of likeminded women. It also offers the template of a culture with very different values to the one we see around us, a space to drop into ourselves and our own intuitive wisdom and to be validated within that.

Rather than seeing therapy as a way to fix a broken person, perhaps it could be a way to heal a damaged world. To bring us together in the spirit of love and connection to envision a kinder way of living, both for ourselves, those around us and even for the planet.

If you’d like to learn more about what therapy could do for you, feel free to book a free chat with me, I’d love to hear from you healingwomanhood.com/book-online