Coaching and Healing Basics Part 4: Embrace Therapy

A great deal of mental health issues and internal conflict can center around two core experiences:

1. What your parents were in conflict over when you were a child, and

2. How your mother treated you.

   
   

Humanity’s nature as a species is to adapt to its context so that life continues. Adaptation is an act of internalization.

The same function takes place within us as individuals. We adapt within the given context of our growth. Imagine a nail hammered into a young tree: as the tree grows, it grows around the nail. Its inherent pattern of being has been altered. Though painful in a sense, the tree becomes more robust. Its system strengthens, and through that initial wound, a unique adaptation emerges—an enhancement not only for the tree but for its species and for life itself.

With this comes choice.

Therapy and coaching widen the lens so one can see this enhancement. One is listened to carefully. One’s story is given meaning. One’s pattern of growth around the “nail” is noticed and brought into the light.

This is important because people do with a therapist or coach exactly what they do with people outside of therapy.

You can think of therapy as a controlled experiment.

Therapist to client: “It’s interesting that you keep telling me you are boring—I’m not sensing that.”

I recall being in a conflict with a past girlfriend. She was in a trance, triggered by past physical abuse. As her voice rose, I felt I had only two options: attack in return (which is what she expected of me, to become the abuser) or be crucified (to sit in powerlessness and take it). In that moment, aware that I was unwilling to choose either option, I burst into tears. Her trance broke. Her face softened. The energy she was exuding shifted instantly.

She became different.

That shift came through an option I did not know existed until that moment. I had to stay open and present—it was the only way through. It was a conscious choice.

That is what good therapy provides: increased self-awareness and the discovery of options that once seemed unavailable.

One finds a way to grow around the nail.

You are given a chance for a new beginning, because you have been seen and heard by someone who offers you a fairer way of looking at yourself than the way you were seen as you were growing up.

Being seen and heard says: You matter.