“Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe – known, that is, to itself!”
E. O. Wilson
Having a brain
As humans we are given one of the most powerful tools in the universe – the brain. It is so powerful that so far it has deemed impossible to be fully understood and mapped out, not to mention to be replicated, despite a number of attempts from many scientific fields. When we buy a modern gadget, say a mobile phone, a TV or some multi-functional kitchen appliance, they all come with a pretty detailed instruction manual, that tells us exactly what we are dealing with, precisely how to use them and what to do to help maintain them at their best. And yet, at the very same time, we are given this unbelievably powerful tool and think it quite normal that we will manage to make good use of it AND take good care of it purely by instinct, or worse yet – by trial and error! An idea, which we all find simply preposterous when it concerns everything that inhabits our kitchen or our living room and yet we somehow take no issue with it whatsoever, when it comes to our own mind…
“Your mind is your instrument. Learn to be its master and not its slave.”
Author unknown
Nourishing the mind
Further still, it takes much more to be a successfully living human than merely having a brain. We are supposed to be able to truly know how to love, live, pick partners, make incredibly difficult choices, forgive, forget, heal, go through events that can pretty much truly make us insane, and eventually face death with dignity, and all this, and more, with no instruction, no guide and no help – simply by the sheer reason of having been born.
In the past, a lot of these challenging and difficult tasks were to a large degree not really up to us, that is, to our individual psychological domains at all. There were society, parents, wider family, the neighborhood, the clan, the ethnic group and the religion, which readily made all those for us, depriving us of much free will or choice, but also sparing us the angst of often painfully difficult decision making, its’ associated responsibility or of the need to know ourselves. And, when there was turmoil or internal unrest, there were the clear unambiguous rules, the wise elders or the local priest, to help us through those. Having largely done away with all those has undoubtedly brought a huge amount of relief and a tremendous amount of opportunity for us, but has also left us with a bit of a psychological vacuum – an unmet need and an undeveloped set of skills – which left us unprepared for the task at hand, which is no lesser than owning our own mind.
As the modern philosopher and founder of the School of Life, Alain De Botton says, there are many places where you can sign up to learn pretty much everything, from calligraphy to space-craft, but there is no place where you can sign up to learn how to live better or how to be a better human being… Psychotherapy is one of the few precious tools that can offer you just that. That is why we can openly claim that Psychotherapy can be useful to everyone, as in short, it is simply made for the human with a mind… (If interested to know more about “who is psychotherapy for” see “Myths & Misconceptions about Psychotherapy“).
“We repeat what we don’t repair…”
Christine Langley-Obaugh
Repeating the same mistakes
A lot of the time people aren’t really fearsome of their future, but rather are anxious of their past repeating itself. Or, that is, of themselves repeating their past… Often our old solutions become the source of our new problems. We get stuck into patterns of coping or of distractions, which rather than lead us to a different and lighter place seem to make us endlessly go around in circles… Stuck in these unconscious patterns of replication we often do not seem to find an end to our misery, but instead it simply changes its’ name. Psychotherapy can help break some of these old shackles, or at least loosen their grip enough for us to be able to live a different future.
“Where you stand determines what you see and what you do not see; it determines also the angle you see it from; a change in where you stand changes everything”.
Steve de Shazer
Changing your outlook
We all have a number of blind-spots that prevent us from seeing ourselves clearly – from seeing our repetitive patterns, our problematic behaviors, our incorrect assumptions and unhelpful beliefs. Just like the mirror helps us clearly see and know our physical appearance, so does psychotherapy help us see and get to know our inner self. And with that new clarity, we can then see ourselves and our lives from an angle where change is both possible and doable.
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them!”
Albert Einstein
Learning new ways
As incredibly powerful as insight is, it often times is not all that is required to enable a real shift. Occasionally we also need to develop a new set of skills or even a different way of being, which will allow us to BE the desired new change. In other words, we often tend to do the things we do, feel the way we do and react the way we do, not because these ways are helpful to us, or we necessarily even like them, but for one reason alone – for we simply know no other way of being… Therapy can build in us that, which is missing in us, that can actually help us solve our current problems and bring about the desired changes in our life.