Sometimes words are confusing
It might happened to you to have a feeling of overall discomfort after speaking with a person. However, seeking what it was to make you feel bad, you couldn’t find a valid reason. The person was polite, gentle, they didn’t say one word out of its place.
So you felt depressed, angry, you felt bad and didn’t understand why, you couldn’t give a name to that discomfort, which was impossible to link to that relationship. But thinking about it, you felt good before that meeting, indeed it was a great day, you made love like never before. Thus, you start thinking that that person who spoke so well, so rational and fair, in reality wasn’t a good person, but they were envious and made you feel bad. But this little thought is immediately banned: how could you think these things of such a gentle person, who even offered themselves to help you? So you start feeling guilty, feeling so mean to dare thinking those horrible things towards someone who had been so nice. You try to forget, but that wellbeing and that joy of living you had until just before that meeting is no longer there.
Let’s change scene and let’s observe what happens in a baby, few months old. A lady comes close and starts complimenting the baby with a nice captivating voice and tries to pick him up, but the baby starts screaming desperate until the lady gives up. After, a boy gets close and the baby reaches his arms to him. We can think that the baby “felt” something, he had a bad feeling with the lady and a good one with the boy.
Moreover, we need to consider that a few-month-old baby doesn’t have a completely developed sight and hearing. But that feeling was very clear, there was no doubt: I do not go with the lady, but with the boy.
Certainly, the baby didn’t “understand” what the lady and the boy had told him, he doesn’t understand the meaning of the words yet. We can imagine that with the boy, he “felt” a sound that matched, with the lady instead something unpleasant.
What happened, in this case, in the transition from baby to adult?
It happened that that world of feelings and images, irrational, which characterized the first year of life, couldn’t develop, it couldn’t evolve towards the knowledge, and become verbal thought and, instead of merging together with the consciousness itself, it finds in consciousness a rational censor, a severe judge who does not admit that feeling of the body, which prevents that uncertain and deficient sensitivity to understand the latent human reality. And it is in these cases that the nameless discomfort that ensues, often accompanied by widespread anger, pushes towards the search for external help.
Sometimes the situation is much worse because that world of the first year of life has been lost, has disappeared, to give way to the rational adult who, with reason, can no longer understand the human reality, especially the latent one. In this case it is highly unlikely that you will have a crisis and it is rather rare that you look for help, because the “cure” is realized by making the other feel bad! But if the other one stops feeling bad…
But in our case things are not like this. Fortunately, a certain sensibility, even though uncertain has remained and, as we said, it pushes us to seek help.
Someone will go searching for the miracle drug that makes disappear as soon as possible and once for all that feeling that creates discomfort and that hinders the normal course of the day. Sometimes, unfortunately often, being treated exclusively with drugs, without the psychiatrist trying to understand the reasons for that crisis, is not a choice.
Nevertheless, many realize that under that discomfort there is something wrong, they want to find out what it is and go to the psychotherapist. And here a world opens up. Think that there are hundreds of schools of psychotherapy entitled to issue the certificate of psychotherapist! In turn, these schools refer to dozens of different theoretical orientations. It is therefore easy to understand that, depending on the therapist you go to, you will get different answers. We will be able to talk about all this in detail later.
But there is another aspect to bear in mind. While if you go to the mechanic to bring your broken scooter, you don’t care whether the mechanic has a valid human reality, the important thing is that he is good, but the same cannot be said of a psychotherapist and I don’t think it is necessary to explain why.
If you, entering the study of the psychotherapist, feel the same discomfort that you felt talking to that man who had ruined your day, even if you do not have the theoretical knowledge that allows you to choose, you have a human reality that tells you something and that feeling, the only element you have to orient yourself, you do not have to lose it, you do not have to deny it and start a false relationship with the technician of the psyche, as good as absent.Because this time, you’re risking a very high price.
In short, I would like to make it clear that there is a big responsibility in the choice of the psychotherapist and you have to have the courage to leave even if they told you that that doctor is so good, he also cured mom!
A small hint to the fact of not having the theoretical knowledge that inspires a certain psychotherapy. In part it can be justified. I’m sick and I’m going to the therapist, I don’t know the theory behind it. If you break a leg, you go to the orthopedist, you don’t study orthopedics! But perhaps in our case, certain knowledge must be within everyone’s reach, must not remain locked in the drawers of the professionals because these are things that concern each of us, they are necessary in our daily lives and not just in the rare and unfortunate event that we break a leg.
But we will have the opportunity to talk about these things. Papillon was born for this as well.
Marco Michelini
Thanks to Chiara Fanasca for the translation of this article.
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