The process of carving your new life!
The last session is not the end of therapy, but rather it is the beginning of your new life!
In some sense, life is a bizarre form of a causal therapeutic process and so, it would be reasonable to say that almost all of us could benefit from the healing aspect of therapy at some point in our lives. The origin of the word therapy derives from the Greek therapeia, meaning healing and healing, in one form or another, is at the heart of all psychological therapy. Another way of looking at healing is preventing, hence the saying "prevention is better than cure! But prevention very often comes as a consequence of experience, be it your own or someone else's. What my aim is with clients, is to get them to a point where they can manage their life, their emotions, their thoughts and beyond that; their behaviour. For if we can manage behaviour we halt the neurological upstream memory activation that links emotion to life.
Grief is a very good example of this. If you have lost someone close to you, it can be a very painful emotional experience, to talk, think or look at pictures of a lost loved one often evokes strong emotions in those early days following the loss. However, as time passes by and the grieving process moves forward we reach a point of acceptance. From that point on, it is no longer the case that every time you think, talk or look at pictures of that loved one that strong feelings arise. That said it is not merely the passage of time that causes the healing but rather the way one passes through the stages of grief; with acceptance being the pivotal part of the healing process.
So, is acceptance the key? Yes but it's not as simple as us saying to ourselves, "I accept their passing" because this acceptance comes from deep within our psyche; it is a subconscious acceptance that becomes part of our consciousness. Therefore, for us each to become wholly functional beings, we too have to learn to accept our own self, for it is within the deeper form of self-acceptance that we can begin to flourish. In this sense of the word, "acceptance", I am referring to self-love, for the emotion of love, as a neurological experience, is at the heart of creation itself; it is life creating and life-sustaining! This means that the more we have of this chemical experience we call love, the more enjoyable life is. That is both from an empirical understanding of the feelings associated with the love experience as well as a bodily experience of wellness. People who sustain a high level of love in their life (chemically speaking), are more likely to live a happy and well-balanced life.
So, I hope it is now clear to you, that the end of your course of my therapy merely allows you to become your own therapist. One which allows you to participate in the structure of and manner in which your life unfolds. Of course, this does not mean that every day will be without its troubles but it could mean that those troubles are not so troublesome to you. We cannot predict what will happen to us but we can decide how we choose to react to that. Adversity is our greatest teacher in life, to capture its lesson is up to us!
Enjoy life, and be happy!