Knowingly or not, people often come to therapy with what are essentially attachment issues, meaning problems with navigating closeness and distance with other people. These are often based in very early relationships that we have had, that now play out later in life.
There are broadly three ways in which therapy can help. The first is insight. Therapy helps you recognize that the way you relate to people is a pattern, the way you’ve organized your personality to navigate other people. By recognizing this, you can start to think about it more in real time as it happens in your life. Notice and think about what you’re doing and why, and what other people are doing and why, to get to get some sort of clarity about this is a pattern rather than an immutable reality that you have to before ever burdened with.
A second part of it is a (potentially unfamiliar) experience of reliability in your life. Someone who is just there and provides a space that can hold the intensity of your emotions, your loneliness, or your need. If this has been a deficit in your life, just its presence now can contribute deeply to a change in your sense of okayness and security.
The third domain, and perhaps the most subtle but most transformative one, is that when you see a therapist you hopeful come to develop a sort of symbolic relationship with that person. In that safe relational space, your old patterns might play out in such a way that you enact something to do with your need, your fear, or your anger. But this time, finally, in a way that can be brought into the room and into awareness, and actually discussed and acknowledged and repaired, experienced as not destructive, as not overwhelming.
Over time, these three modes of change in therapy can help you replace your template for how you relate to other people. Entrenched patterns of, say, being desperately in need of someone else, or fundamentally terrified of closeness, or very confused by the presence of someone significant, can come to be replaced in your mind and body by a sense that it’s okay to be around them. That there’s a way to navigate relationships that hopefully contains both your need for them and your ability to feel secure in yourself alone.
Image credit: Dmitry Vechorko
