Handling Ourselves with Care
How Going Slow in Therapy Helps You Practice Actually Valuing Yourself
When we think about mailing or transporting something we value, that could be broken on a rough journey, we tend to take the time to surround it with bubble wrap, packing peanuts, or even newspaper. Well, therapy is rough, and we should be valuing ourselves. How do we protect ourselves on the difficult path towards healing?
Sometimes I will see people force themselves to jump straight into the deep trauma work and deny any discomfort even when asked by their therapist. As a therapist that often deals with trauma, I really advise against doing this. Sure, throwing a plate across a street may get it there faster, but it will more than likely break the plate! Taking time to prepare and soften any jostling within ourselves as we heal helps to ensure that we will make it through the recovery voyage without being harmed along the way.
Not everyone is comforted in the same way, just like how a bubble mailer would be satisfactory for some fragile items, but packing peanuts might work better for others. In people, that comfort can be found sometimes in making sure the setting feels cozy, with soft lights, plush fabrics, fidget toys, and a warm tea. In others, comfort might have to do with the person they are opening up and entrusting their well-being with. They may want to know more about the therapist, take a slower pace, and just build trust with “smaller issues” at first.
Taking the time to notice your own comfort and actually respecting it is vital in therapy. It is the human equivalent of noticing how fragile an item is and adjusting how you handle it in order to protect it. Now, I have made comparisons to “fragile” items quite a bit, and you might balk, saying “I’m not fragile, so I don’t need to be ‘handled with care’.” Everything has a breaking point, and for the things we value the most, we take the time to maintain it and notice when it needs care.
Think of a car, or even a house. Neither of those are easily broken! Yet we spend lots of time and effort into preventing a car from getting hit, and we regularly repair parts of our homes. Why is it so much easier to want to protect our large purchases rather than ourselves? I would guess it has to do with how much we actually value ourselves.
As we minimize our mental health and comfort needs, we end up devaluing ourselves. Healing our deeper traumas includes starting to value ourselves and our comfort. Therapy is the place perfect to start actually practicing doing that.
Thanks to the OfficeMax off of Broadway and Rural in Tempe for letting me wander the store a bit, randomly taking photos of office supplies. It definitely inspired me with therapy metaphors!
