Therapy for Becoming Strong Enough to Know Who You Are

Sometimes, due to lack of emotional support during key development points, or because of harsh and demoralizing formative relationships, a person is too weak to know themselves truly.

A person who grew up feeling shunned, dismissed, cutoff, severely misunderstood, criticized routinely for their thinking and opinions, likely will become a grown person who has significant fear of possibilities by interacting with other people.

The person inhibits themselves, similar to the patterns of being inhibited by the meaningful grown people who raised them.

Such a person will almost certainly feel they are taking a great chance to start therapy.

They are facing the risk of finding out whether their therapist will treat them any better than the significant others who impressed a sense of being worthless on the client.

Bravo to anyone who pushes ahead and decides to start a therapy for themselves.

This decision reflects courage and optimism on the part of the client!

Consider this small cautionary note to both client and therapist, of someone who would like knowing a better self-definition and developing stronger confidence in their newly emerging self-definition.

The client usually requires some time to simply recognize the therapist as respectful and kind.

For someone who has had only a slim range of other people who treated them with dignity, and who largely expects mistreatment as normal, with acceptance or rejection as the only two possible responses, growing the awareness of subtlety and complexity, the rhythm of engagement and rest period, are likely brand new.

Patience by both client and therapist is required during this deeply transformative phase when the client sees the difference between love and manipulation presenting as love, or between uninterested, exhausted, depleted parents not to mean the client is uninteresting, exhausting, or the reason for the parental depletion.

Freedom and joy of becoming oneself, will be the reward of this patience to establish baseline self-love within the client. Both the client and the therapist will feel a sense of "job well done"!