Being in Therapy Doesn't Mean You're Doing Inner Healing Work
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
People have peculiar ways of helping themselves. I don’t blame them. We learned how to care for ourselves from our parents and caregivers. Or we acquired adaptive strategies to help us survive challenging life experiences. Obviously, if we weren’t taught skillful ways of coping, then we don’t know skillful ways of coping. We rely on whatever resource is available to us at the moment. We typically fall into the trap of using strategies that help us in the short term but don’t support us long-term.
Our society doesn’t exactly encourage us to do meaningful inner healing work either. Instead, it tells us that we’ll be happy if we make more money, get thinner, or take a pill.
Here are some examples:
You stop drinking for a month after you notice you are drinking in excess.
You join a book club because you feel disconnected from your spouse.
You join a gym to get healthier after developing a chronic illness.
You watch a movie to distract yourself from your depressive thoughts.
You read a self-help book because you’ve always hated your career.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with not drinking, joining a book club or a gym, watching movies, or reading a self-help book. In general, these are healthy.
But they don’t get to the root of the problem.
If you don’t understand why these issues showed up, to begin with, you won’t resolve these issues for good. Your methods of distraction keep you from understanding them. The gym membership will not address why you continuously find yourself in chaotic and stressful situations. Your book club will never reveal the attachment issues that are causing the problems in your marriage. Likewise, not drinking won’t tell you what pain you were trying to numb, how it got there, or how to heal it.
It’s like skimming the surface of the water, never diving deep into what’s causing the problem in the first place.
For years I’d held myself to impossible standards when it came to academics or my career. To avoid failure, I’d work myself into the ground. When I achieved something, I relished the acknowledgment other people gave me. Then, to get more praise, I set an even higher standard. There was no end to what I was willing to do to feel successful. With every achievement, there was more to prove.
I can look back and see many points in my life where my striving for success came at a high cost to my health and well-being. Yet, even after noticing obvious signs of chronic stress in my body, I worked harder. It’s like achievement was my solution to every problem.
On the outside, I looked like I had it all together. Others saw a hard-working, organized, detail-oriented, knowledgable, steady person. This made it difficult to stop the behavior. I liked being seen this way.
On the inside, I was filled with anxiety, had an extreme fear of failure, and my critical inner voice was just plain cruel. Nevertheless, I believed that I had to keep achieving things to be worth something.
When I got Crohn’s disease, a holistic doctor encouraged me to do deeper psychological work to heal. I had been in therapy for years, but I still felt disconnected from myself, my body, and my spiritual life. I was desperate to find a way out of this illness, so I did it.
The work was challenging AND massively life-changing. Through that experience, I discovered what was driving this need to achieve things. I healed the wounds. I transformed my relationship with myself, my body, emotions, thoughts, illness, and spirit. And while I still can be a bit of an over-achiever, the impulse isn’t as strong. Instead, I can notice it, connect with my inner knowing, and make choices that support and nourish me in the long run.
And by the way, my illness healed. But not by finding a way of out it. I had to tread right through the thick of it.
I also realized that I hadn’t been getting the most out of therapy in the past. It wasn’t the therapist’s fault. I came to each session and talked about stupid shit. I used the fact that I was in therapy to justify that I was doing the work. I probably thought I WAS doing the work.
That’s why I’m writing this blog article. Perhaps you’re not doing the work either.
What is Inner Healing Work?
Inner healing work is diving deep into your psychological self (your psyche). It’s about exploring what’s there - both conscious and unconscious. You’ll allow your “inner knowing” (some people call this Divine Intelligence) to heal the pain that has been stored (or programmed) in your mind. Psychological inner healing work aims to understand yourself and your motivations and experience transformation on a deeper level.
It’s like taking the mask off. You stop pretending to be something other than you are. You quit running, hiding, and fighting with your inner world. Instead, you learn to turn inward and allow yourself to see all the thoughts, beliefs, memories, and wounds that have been hidden.
When you do your inner work, you process the pain from your past, the present, and the future. You identify patterns and work through them (not around them). All that energy that caused your mental, emotional and spiritual blocks will get transformed into a power that helps you heal.
When you heal these wounds, you will feel less depressed, anxious, lonely, and scared. You’ll feel more freedom, peace, love, joy, confidence, and passion.
Here are some reasons you might need inner healing work.
You consider yourself someone who “isn’t a crier,” but in certain situations, your emotions feel overwhelming.
You’re using substances, shopping, gambling, social media, TV, sleep, exercise, food, etc., in excess, and you find it difficult to stop or modify your consumption long term.
Most days, you wake up with a tight, anxious, fearful, or nervous feeling in your chest.
You can’t sleep well.
You feel like your head is just above water most of the time; your life could spiral out of control at any minute.
You feel fragile emotionally and physically.
You have no (or an obscure) spiritual life. When someone talks about having a “sense of Self,” you have no idea what that means.
Your relationships have a pattern of unfulfilling, chaotic, detached, unstable, or run hot/cold.
It’s hard for you to set personal boundaries, you’re over-boundaried (need to control everything and everyone), or you have no idea what boundaries are.
You don’t feel like you can rely on yourself to navigate life’s challenges; you are desperate not to be alone.
You’ve tried many things to improve your situation or your life (maybe even therapy), but the problems persist.
You blame, project, lash out, sulk, and complain about how other people always make your life hard. Or you’ve been told that you do these things.
How to do inner healing work with your therapist
If you’re wondering if you’re doing this kind of work with your therapist, you probably aren’t.
This quote sums up what if feels like:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
- Theodore Roosevelt, Excerpt from the speech “Citizenship In A Republic” delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April 1910
Inner work requires courage.
How do you know if you’re courageous?
The proof of courage is vulnerability. It requires a lot of courage to get into the arena and put yourself in a position where you can be judged, dismissed, or even attacked. It’s about the courage to show up when you can’t predict or control the outcome.
Here are some ways to do transformational work with your therapist:
Choose a therapist who does depth work. Depth therapists often use terms like psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, Jungian, existential, transpersonal, humanistic, or trauma therapies. Not all therapists use these terms so ask them if their work leans more behavioral (less depth work) or more relational (more depth work).
Prioritize therapy by showing up every week and making good use of the time.
Observe your thoughts and beliefs. Then be willing to tell your therapist about them.
Observe your behaviors and decisions. Then tell your therapist about what you’re observing.
Remain open and curious about yourself. Approach everything with an inquisitive mind.
Practice new skills with your therapist, like setting a boundary or communicating your needs.
Trust your therapist even when it feels uncomfortable. You may not know what your therapist can hold until you ask them to hold it.
Focus on having a compassionate, gentle, and friendly relationship with yourself.
Don’t view your therapist as all-knowing. There’s a place inside you that knows. Trust it. Your therapist is there to help you find it and listen to it.
When therapy feels stalled or stagnate, say something. If your therapist makes you feel hurt, angry, or confused, tell them. If you have a question about your treatment, be sure to ask. We don’t like being left in the dark because it could mean that we weren’t as effective as we could have been.
Exploration of the unconscious necessitates high levels of trust and acceptance. If this doesn’t develop within the first five or six sessions, talk with the therapist about your feelings or get a new therapist.
If you’re interested in doing this kind of work with a therapist, I say DO IT. This type of investment is like no other investment you’ve ever made in your life. It will give you returns FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. For the first time, you’ll know what it’s like to feel conscious, awake, peaceful, and free.
Exploring how these themes resonate in your own life? Therapy can be a place to unpack, find clarity, and move forward in a way that feels true to you. If you’re interested in seeing how we might work together, here are a few areas I specialize in: Therapy for Women, Therapy for Chronic Illness, Therapy for Body Acceptance.