Explore fear
Sometimes fear is tucked away so deep inside that you can no longer reach it and actually no longer know how it originated. Throughout your life you have learned to put that fear away because, let’s face it, even if you feel bad, the feeling will change again, even if it takes a week (or longer). Something else naturally happens that demands attention, and those feelings then predominate.
We talk about this fear and I ask her questions.
She can’t tell me much about it.
When I ask her if there is a specific place in her body where she feels this fear, she immediately puts a fist to her heart.
Let’s start there.
I asked her to depict what the fear in her body looks like. Here on the right is the result…
Surprised, I mention that I see no fear at all…
She starts telling how well she is doing and how she has beautiful things around her and how she has other people around her who help her.
Still no fear…
And then the pictures move aside and hidden underneath is a picture that shows her fear. She prefers not to talk about it and hides the picture again.
However, I stopped and asked her questions about that fear. She starts to cry and says almost desperately that she doesn’t know how it got there, what it looks like, and that it can’t leave either because she’s in there.
These are not easy moments in therapy, confronting something you’ve been hiding all your life. But how brave she is! And what a gut she has that she wants to confront very carefully. She doesn’t know how, but I reassure her that we will take it step by step together.
These kinds of confrontations are the difficult moments in therapy, but also the most beautiful moments. Because in those confrontations something comes loose. Usually, it has been stuck for a long time and also bothered. Ignoring and running away from it has worked nicely so far, but the feeling keeps coming up and bothering you. And often it has a bigger role in making choices and decisions than we think.
What a great challenge to take on together! Expose step by step, create space to process, and consciously cover again when necessary.
