When I began to take an interest in the helping professions (at 20 I wanted to be a psychologist and in the end I arrived 30 years later at the professions of coaching and psychotherapy!), I thought that we “healed.”
Like from a cold, bronchitis, or a broken leg.
It was by beginning to study and experience things in depth that I realized that it was not really that.
But then, what happens?
“Understanding” is a first essential step
Everyone has a more or less accurate idea of what psychoanalysis offers, namely support that unfolds over a long period of time and whose principle consists in bringing to light repressed elements in the unconscious that cause problems in the present. I will not go into the debates surrounding psychoanalysis here; many books and articles do that very well.
But the principle of understanding and identifying the roots of the problem remains valid. It is valid in other disciplines such as sociology or anthropology and their application in companies as well as in society in general.
Putting a finger on “what hurt,” whatever the intensity, the type of problem, the time when it happened, is the first step toward improving the situation. That said, it can take a lot of time because psychic time is not ordinary time. And even if we have precisely identified what hurt us or left its mark, that does not mean we know how to immediately change our ways of being or of apprehending things.
Spontaneously, some approaches are more solution-oriented, focused on the “here and now” and the future. Less on exploring root causes. This is, moreover, the subject of endless debates in the psychology world, notably between advocates of cognitive and behavioral therapies vs psychoanalysts, for example.
That said, when one looks at the former, one realizes that they are far from ignoring the patient’s past. They simply do not decode it with the same frame of reference!
Let us nonetheless remember that whatever change we want, whatever greater well-being we want to achieve, the first part of the work generally consists in understanding and looking at the issue that concerns us from a little further away, with the help of a professional (therapist or coach, depending on what one is looking for). What do we do today or what do we feel, whose origins go back to childhood or adolescence? With whom have we lived or interacted whose behavior has marked us? ... What shocks or traumas have sunk into a sometimes capricious memory?
Exploring the past, more in the realm of therapy, can then have different degrees of depth depending on the person’s wishes or the approaches used. It can also sometimes be done in several stages, while allowing time to integrate and “let mature” certain realizations.
“Getting into motion” creates the real beginning of change
I realized in my own personal work that having “understood” or put a finger on what may be the cause or one of the causes of present difficulties is generally not enough.
That is probably why I chose coaching, before realizing that being a therapist was a vocation I had somewhat ignored. But whatever the approach, it has seemed to me for a long time that “getting into motion” is essential.
Whether it involves trying to do things “differently from what we have always done,” even with tiny actions at the start, or through more radical changes, it is action that allows one to overcome the blocking factor. It can sometimes be not sending a text message when one would have “always done it that way” and it causes arguments; it can be confronting a fear little by little (getting close to a spider, even from afar, rather than turning one’s eyes away)...
And this movement is also linked to what is happening in our body. That is why I chose to train in body-oriented psychotherapeutic approaches (see my other article distinguishing the different forms of body-oriented therapies [https://www.coherentia.fr/post/mon-corps-mon-allié]).
Putting one’s body into motion, reconnecting with it, learning again to love it, to trust it, taking the time to let emotions express themselves through physical exercises, dance, etc., are all actions that make it possible to reassure oneself, to feel better, to make peace with oneself, to repair oneself.
Thus, after understanding, we act by, with, and for ourselves. And therefore in our relationship with others and with the world.
“Transform” oneself to live and be better
The alchemists believed that lead could be transformed into gold. From a symbolic point of view, lead is us “before,” it is that version of ourselves that we no longer really like or no longer like very much. Gold is what we want to strive toward; it is what some call our “better version.” I do not really subscribe to this widespread expression because it assumes 1) that there is a predefined “better version” in advance (but which one?!!) and 2) because it can be misunderstood and too strongly oriented toward a search for performance, which is not at all the desired goal.
“Transformation” is that sometimes long process, sometimes strewn with many stages, sometimes discouraging because it does not happen fast enough, through which we change our view of ourselves, of the world, of what has happened to us, in order little by little to reach the point where it no longer clutters us, no longer weighs us down. We do not make it disappear; we soften its colors and brightness, like a photograph fading under the effect of the sun.
A beautiful metaphor for what therapy can bring: Kintsugi, the Japanese tradition of repairing broken ceramics with a lacquer sprinkled with gold, silver, or platinum powder, thus highlighting the cracks instead of hiding them.
To transform is to start from a material, from an initial situation, assess all its characteristics, ask oneself what one would like to arrive at, and put in place all the gestures and actions that make it possible to move toward that goal. The goal itself also evolving throughout the process.
Through training in coaching, psychology, and psychotherapy, and through my own personal work, I understood that I was mistaken when I was 20. If therapy “repairs,” it is not by allowing a return to a state prior to the trauma or the problems encountered. No, therapy “repairs” by offering the possibility of rebuilding oneself differently, using the gold dust that life offers us and having the courage to get moving toward the Self.
