How Individual Therapy Helps
Imagine you’re hiking a trail one day, and out of the blue, a snake appears, coils, and strikes you in the leg. The terror of such an event, a threat to survival, can be etched in our minds. If we survive such an event, then it’s very likely we’re going to be very vigilant, maybe hyper-vigilant, to snakes. We may get anxious just thinking about a hike, or we may get nervous when we think of snakes. We may give up hiking, or avoid areas like the one in which we got the snakebite. We might see a stick and flinch, mistaking it for something far more dangerous.
Frightening and painful events can leave us seeing through a protective lens which distorts our perception, causing us to see neutral situations as dangerous.
If that could happen after one bad snakebite, imagine the kinds of distorted lenses we can develop in our childhoods, in the most sensitive and formative time in our life, if we are exposed to hurtful or harmful behaviors from those from whom we need care - be they parents or caregivers or others we encounter in our childhood worlds.
Decades of scientific research reveals that the stances we take as adults towards ourselves, our spouses, our colleagues, and our friends and family members, including our children, are shaped by these early life experiences, as well as big events later in life (such as health crises or life-or-death situations).
The ways in which we are provided with love and support in our youth become our sources of strength and confidence. If we are given congruence by our caregivers and loved ones, meaning that what they said is what we really and authentically experienced, we will experience our adulthood feeling secure in our self-worth; we will have our issues and challenges, insecurities and doubts, but our underlying sense of ourselves through the ups and downs will be positive, the baseline will be “I’m a good person, deserving of love, and things are going to be okay.”
However, if we grow up in a house where we regularly experience hostility or intimidation or dismissiveness or lack of care; if the childhood home does not feel safe, or we spend long periods of time alone with no adult caregiver to help us understand our feelings and put them into words; these experiences cause emotional pain - fear, shame, loneliness - to be wired into our sense of ourselves and the world around us, and the extent to which we experience these is the extent to which we may enter adulthood with insecurity - a deep underlying sense that things are not okay, that “something is wrong with me” and “the world is not safe,” “that people are unreliable.” Just like the snake-bit hiker who goes on to mistake sticks for snakes, we may find ourselves going through the world seeing it, not as it actually exists, but through the lens of our childhood experiences, reacting to the world of now through the lens of the past, and because we human beings don’t like feeling the vulnerability (fear, shame, and loneliness) that we felt as children, we also carry with us the stances we developed as children to protect against those vulnerable feelings.
Our protective stances can take any number of forms, and often we have a collection of protective stances, aka coping strategies, to protect us from having to feel the underlying emotional pain. If we grew up in a house where a parent was often critical and demeaning to us, then as adults, we may likely get defensive with our spouse is it seems they are upset with us. We may use anger to fight back and argue, or we may shut down and avoid our partner - behaviors which in childhood were really necessary to endure the harsh parenting, but which in the present aren’t helpful at all in maintaining a healthy and positive relationship.
In short, the emotional pain of childhood, as well as painful losses and events later in life, can distort how we see the world and cause us to take protective stances which are unhelpful:
if we had a harsh or critical parent, we may react by becoming angry, defensive, or scared when a colleague or spouse gives us feedback
If we had parents who were always busy, or unavailable and unreliable due to other reasons, such as alcohol or substance use, we might find intimacy to be highly anxiety-provoking; after all, we didn’t feel lovable enough to mom or dad or other adults in our childhood, how can we trust that anyone else will find us lovable? If we couldn’t rely on our parents, how can we really rely on anyone?
If we go through a traumatizing experience, a life or death experience - such as an assault, natural disaster, car accident - we might get stuck in protective mode, reliving the event, scared it could happen again, and confused and ashamed that we can’t get out from under the anxiety and fear
the coping strategies -the ways we learned to distract or check out from emotional pain in our youth - may take over our lives, becoming addictive or compulsive habits - alcohol or substance use, gambling, porn, gaming, excessive screen time - and keeping our lives stuck in limited and unfulfilling situations
Individual therapy is an effective way to release us from the negative patterns of experience described above. Therapy helps us learn to see the protective ways we react and the unhelpful beliefs we hold towards ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us. We learn to see through the negative beliefs that have shaped our actions and behaviors into negative patterns; and therapy helps us learn to set our protective lenses aside. We heal the old underlying emotional wounds from childhood, which allows us to experience clear and new outlooks on our lives. We break out of old negative patterns and take new, constructive actions, and as we do so, we feel greater confidence, and feel greater success in our relationships. Rather than feeling plagued by self-criticism and self-doubt, we begin to feel more comfortable in ourselves and more optimistic about the future, more accepting of our emotional experience and more accepting of other’s - such as our partners and our children. Where we once felt threatened, we feel safety and ease. Where we once felt anxiety and fear, we feel hope.