20 things I've learned from 20 years in the therapy room

.....And celebrating one year here on Substack 🥳

Image by Stephanie Harvey on Unsplash

Before we launch into today’s content, I’d like to just acknowledge that this week marks my first anniversary here on Substack – a whole year since I impulsively dived in and launched this little corner of the web called

The Therapy Room

.

There’s been an inner writer dying for expression since childhood and she’s so delighted to finally find a forum for her voice. Words are cascading out of my head, queueing up to get onto the page.

I’m so deeply grateful to the more than 400 of you who have joined me here so far as subscribers. Your comments and feedback make my heart sing, and I’m excited to see where we go next on this journey together.

While my writing career is in its infancy, my therapy career is now in its third decade. One of the things I love about my work is that it’s a continual growth and learning for me, as much as for my clients. Even on my hardest days, being there for others helps me drop into my heart, reminds me of our shared humanity, and puts life’s struggles into perspective.

Today, I thought I would gather together a few of the nuggets I have gleaned from over 23 years of sitting in the hot seat. Many of these are worthy of entire posts in their own right. Feel free to mention in the comments if there’s something in particular you’d like me to expand on.

Here are a few of the things I have learned…

1.      Everybody you meet is carrying burdens, wounds and hurts. None of us make it out of this life untouched by trauma.

2.      Most of our fears and struggles circle around the same three themes – worthiness (am I good enough?), belonging (am I loved?) and safety/control (is something bad going to happen?)

3.      Everyone except the true narcissists of this world fear that they are not good enough.

4.      Narcissists have developed a strong defence against feeling not good enough, but underneath their defence of superiority, their fears tend to be the same.

5.      There is something likeable and relatable about everyone once you hear the most vulnerable parts of their story, their deepest fears, their insecurities.

6.      Some things can’t be fixed, but we can learn to bear them. Having a compassionate witness helps.

7.      Working through your painful stuff can be light and playful as well as heavy and serious.

8.      A regulated nervous system helps to support just about every aspect of our physical and mental health. (I’ve written more about this here).

9.      We often escape our bodies in an attempt to escape our pain, but our bodies are where healing can occur. Reconnecting with the body is the fast track to healing.

10.      Even the most confusing behaviours make sense when we know enough of the backstory of why and how they came to be.

11.      The antidote to depression is not positivity – it is fully feeling your sadness or shame or rage. (You can read about this here).

12.      If we look back through history, each generation was passing on what they received undigested from the one before and doing the best they could with what they had. In that sense, ultimately no one is to blame (though we are accountable for our actions). - I’ve written more about intergenerational trauma here.

13.      When people tell you their problems, they primarily want to be witnessed and heard and entrusted to find their own answers. Advice-giving is secondary (if at all). Hold off until you’re sure it’s really wanted.

14.     Everyone has access to inner wisdom (though it can become obscured) and the answers always land more powerfully when they come from the inside.

15.      Nothing other people do is really about you. Other people are acting out their own internal world – you are just a walk-on part in their internal drama. Their behaviour is showing you a glimpse of their inner world.

16.      You can’t change another person, but you can change how you show up or respond in the face of their behaviour (and you can choose to walk away).

17.      If we want to understand our relationships, we need to understand our childhood patterns – the ways our needs were met, or not met, in our earliest relationships. The patterns of too much or not enough.

18.      Everything is impermanent. Even the darkest despair or the deepest panic ends at some point and eventually shifts into something else.

19.      When you’re at a crossroads in life, it’s easy to imagine that one route is the ‘right’ route, the other is the ‘wrong’ route – we often get paralysed by the fear of making a terrible mistake. The reality is, with most situations in life, both routes will be hard, both will have rewards. Sometimes it’s a choice of which kind of hard we’re willing to do.

20.      There is always more work you can do on yourself, until the day you die. And you are already enough exactly as you are. Both sides of this paradox are true.

Thanks for reading. Now over to you… Do any of these ideas resonate with you? What would you add to that list? What essential nuggets have you learned from therapy or from life? I’d love to hear your thoughts (if you’re reading this in an email, click through to the website to join the conversation).

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