Har du funderat på att prova terapi? 

Den kanske tyngsta månaden på året är väl ändå November. Om du har något som tynger dig på insidan också, får du gärna komma på ett gratis 50 min samtal via länk. Sjävklart utan någon förbindelse. Hör av dig om du är intresserad! 

Detta är en tillfällig möjlighet att prova på psykoterapi med mig. Erbjudandet gäller i mån av plats och endast för nya klienter.

Läs mer om mig och hur jag jobbar på min hemsida: spaceforreflections.com. 

Have you ever considered therapy? 

Perhaps the heaviest month in Sweden is here, and this year it’s particularly gray, wet, and cloudy. If it feels like that on the inside too, you are very welcome to a free online session with me. No strings attached. Get in touch if you’re interested! 

This is a temporary opportunity to try psychotherapy with me. The offer is subject to availability and only for new clients. Read more about me and my method at: spaceforreflections.com. 

…might not be what you think it is. Many believe that you need to be uncomfortable and look at things you don’t want to look at. This is not true. You come to therapy because YOU want to; only then can true work happen. If you feel pressured to open up, please respect your boundaries and don’t go there. You have no obligations to do anything particular in therapy. In actuality, sitting with someone in silence, respecting your boundaries together, might be the most therapeutic thing for the time being and be just that deep work that you truly want. So let’s respect that, and respect the defenses that have kept you relatively safe over the years, and work together at a pace that feels safe and takes your will to the highest account. All concerns are valid, and you have every right to stop exploring whatever, if that is what you feel is right for you. 

To continue from previous posts, the obvious question is: how to go from self-criticism and hate to more self-love? The key is to separate “I have a thought saying ‘I’m useless´” and you – separate what your defense mechanisms are doing in service of loyalty to your attachment figures and your being. You can then learn to understand that when you have angry feelings, self-criticism comes instead. Then you can start to learn how to have that angry feeling in your body instead of it going to your head and hurting you, by carefully monitoring the anxiety this work provokes. The angry feeling can then be felt and show you a memory of when this pattern got established, which you then can work through – feel the anger and feel the guilt of having that anger. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a lot of pain there, pain for love not received. You can then mourn, hold space, and heal. Now, when you revisit anger, the self-attacking thoughts don’t feel as true; they come with a question mark, “Maybe I’m bad?”. With more work, “Oh, here goes self-critique again! I wonder who I’m angry with. Let’s see how I experience this anger”. And voilá! Now you rely on your feelings and inner life. Of course, we might (most likely) need some help on this journey. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions that I can help you with! 

Say that your mother was harsh on you when you were a small child. That made you angry. To be angry with your mother might not be safe, maybe your mother couldn’t handle and help you with your anger, so you learned how to channel your anger into something “acceptable” that would keep the bond with your mother intact – your means of survival. To solve this tricky situation, the child identifies with the mother in one of three ways: “I treat myself as my mother treats me”, “I treat others like my mother does”, or “I’m fearful that others will treat me as my mother does”. A child cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality, so your mother’s criticism is simply true. Onwards, there is no distinction between “I did something bad” and “I am bad”. To get some of your mother’s love, you have to be “not bad” as in perhaps act perfectly, having high standards that you punish yourself for not living up to. Also, whenever angry feelings stir up in you, one of the three identifications gets activated instead, for example: your boss fires you in an unjustifiably way, which makes you angry, but all you experience is “I’m useless, I can’t even keep a job”. 

If you are sick of this kind of automatic thinking ruled by the superego, which I wrote about in my last post, the “cure” is to learn how to distinguish reality from fantasy and increase the capacity to hold a complex reality. We are all sometimes “bad” and sometimes “good” – and we still have intrinsic value as human beings. To learn to hold a more complex reality means work. For some valid reasons, the psyche has learned that this is the “safest” way to handle things. I write “safest” with quotation marks, because it was the safest, but now it perpetuates your suffering. It was the safest because it made it possible to maintain the bond with important caregivers when you were little, but now, when you’re grown up, you succumb to the pain of your psyche’s own invention. In short, the negative feelings you felt for many reasons when you were little had nowhere safe to go but back onto you. This is sometimes called the “gift of love” (Benjamin, L) – I take on the negative feelings that don’t fit in our relationship, so our relationship can be good and positive. 

Yes! You have unconditional value, just like anyone else, given your innate worth as a human being. If you now notice thoughts popping up in your mind saying “that’s not true”, “I’m not worthy”, “that goes for everybody else but me” or something of the sort, you probably have a pretty harsh superego. A superego is a concept that is made up of a collection of identifications based on early experiences and feelings, values, and a striving for truth that guide us in different ways. So if you have a harsh superego, you might believe you have no intrinsic value, you need to perform in a certain way to be worthy of love. 

Someone who believes in his/her intrinsic value will trust their feelings and inner life to guide him/her. Someone who doesn’t will dismiss her feelings and inner life and rely on self-doubt for guidance instead. This self-doubt may, in short, take three forms: “I’m bad”, “you’re bad”, or “you think I’m bad”. If this rings true to you, be on the lookout for my next posts about why this is and what to do about it. Also, don’t hesitate to reach out to me or another psychologist or psychotherapist if you would like to work on this, so you can live the good life you deserve. 

Reality is complex. It can be a painful experience, a joyful one, or anything in between. At the same time, reality just is, but we rarely treat it like something that just is. When things are painful, we want reality to be something else, and when things are good, we want to hold on. Our minds do all different kinds of maneuvers in service of this. When we rely on our minds, or more specifically, our thoughts or ideas, of what we think is real, we are deceiving ourselves, at least partly. 

Knowing that our thoughts are just our thoughts, mere suggestions of how to interpret reality, liberates us from our own notion of certainty. Which may sound paradoxical, isn’t certainty what we want? Of course, to feel like we are on top of things, having some sort of perceived control, can feel good, but it is a fantasy. It makes us stuck in how things should be, and if they’re not, then it’s “wrong”. If there weren’t any specific way things should be like, if we were just open to what is, would we suffer as much? 

Should we just accept anything as it is? War? Abuse? Criminal acts? Of course not. That is not what I’m trying to convey here. He/she who can live in uncertainty, in the not-knowing, is the freer person. If we can experience reality as open-mindedly as we can and anchor that with our emotional experience, our call to action or no action becomes clear. 

Can we let them be unclear? Can we be with the reality of what is and see what the next move will be? Can we allow ourselves to pause our stories of how we think things are? 

Sending compassion and patience to all who need it right now. <3