I guess that through the healing process, everyone has to, in one way or another, connect with these dark sides of the soul. Places where you do not go out of joy or pure willingness, but rather out of need or pressured by the impact and effect that those unseen and unresolved processes and fears are creating in your daily life.

When people arrive at therapy sessions, we try to delineate a journey, a path to follow so as not to lose sight of our destination. Within that journey, I trace the different stops we will need to take on the path to recovery or healing. Many of those stops are connected with limiting beliefs that are simultaneously connected with some fears (many of them totally unconscious and automatic). It is important to see the trajectory to understand the purpose of facing your darker memories; otherwise, it feels like an act of pure masochism. But, to understand that brings light to the dark to see what it is really about brings a level of reassurance to the client and a motivation to pass through the uncomfortable because at the end of the journey, you have the best of resolutions, a deeper connection to your real and genuine self.

That said, the process feels at times endless and painful, as if we have been hiding and covering so many of those fears for so many years that we cannot access to their roots or that we have grown so comfortable and familiar to them that we are obliouvous to the impact and consequences that they are having in our lives. Either way, the role of the therapists is to accompany the client through the process of rediscovery, allowing him or her to see the patterns and process as a consequence of those limitations or irrational fears. As if just by walking alongside you could acknowledge the reasons why those fears had been developed, validating the initial response, minimising the weight of shame or guiltiness along the way, bringing the idea that we all human and we all had gone through the process, we all have suffered and we all have the potential to heal and recover. And at times that is more than enough to encourage to another to do the difficult journey, to know that they are not alone.

I am so grateful to be allowed to walk that path with my clients and, more importantly, with myself. Because on the path of healing, we all have the potential to do the journey and show up for ourselves.

Hari om tat sat.