– Remembering Our Childhood in Individual Counseling

LEARNING HOW OUR CHILDHOOD CAN INFORM OUR CURRENT PATTERNS THROUGH NASHVILLE INDIVIDUAL THERAPY

As overstated as it may be that individual counseling in Nashville will ultimately bring people back to their childhoods, it is still quite important to unpack.  It is never a necessity that individuals in counseling need to go back and understand their past.  For some people in therapy, this may never happen. But most theories of personality and development underscore that the means by which we adopted certain methods for moving through daily life were set in place by as early as two years old.  For many individuals in counseling, this is not relevant to their understanding of pain and frustration at their current life predicaments.  All people know is that they are suffering and they want it to stop.

There are very good individual therapists in Nashville who believe that the most gracious way of understanding our current setbacks is to explore how we came to employ these patterns that we enact on a daily basis.  Different people react in different ways to different stimuli.  For example, when a certain person feels hurt, they will retreat and shut down.  Another person, when hurt, may fire back with anger and insults at the person who hurt them.  Another person, when feeling hurt, may take all the blame on themselves for “causing” the other person to do something harmful to them.  There are countless other examples, but there are almost always patterns.

Individual counseling in Nashville can be helpful in the beginning by simply showing people how they react in repetitive ways.  This is not a bad thing!  As humans, we need to create patterns of interacting with our environment, so that we can react more quickly and not be frozen in indecision.  The reality for most people is that they learned certain patterns of interacting with their environment that gave them the best chance of surviving those situations.  Not to belabor the point, but people don’t need to remember their childhood in order to have successful therapy sessions.  The problem arises when a person begins to realize that their current patterns of reacting to situations is not the reaction that they would like to enact.  For example, a friend bails on you for dinner and you react by saying to them, “It’s okay.  Don’t worry about it.  We can catch up another time.”  Once you get out of their presence, you start to think, “What is wrong with me?  Why do they keep bailing on me?  Am I not fun to hang out with?  It seems like people bail on me all the time.”  Then you go and lay on your couch and stare at the ceiling, thinking of all the ways you are not fun to hang out with.

When a person comes to their individual counseling session in Nashville talking about how they are “no fun to be with,” it begs the question: Are they really not fun to be with?  A good therapist in Nashville will also want to ask, “Is it really okay with you that your friend bailed on you?”  Most people, in the scenario described above, wished they could say something different to their friend, but feel like, “I just can’t say anything different.”  This is where the problem arises.  The individual doesn’t like how they react to their friend, but feel powerless to do or say anything differently.  This is where patterns and graciousness can come into contact.

Quality individual therapy in Nashville will ask people to wrestle with this question: Where did you learn to feel that you couldn’t do anything differently?  And the next question will follow: What stops you from saying or doing something differently?  Often, it is these questions that will require a person to think outside of their currently held assumptions about themselves and their environment.  People don’t need to go back to their childhood to engage these questions.  They definitely don’t have to.  There is usually enough current information from their daily life to help a person think and act differently.  But almost always, a person will have to go back to some point in the past, even if it is just last week, to realize that their responses have histories and those histories have repetitions.

If you are looking for good individual counseling in Nashville, TN, because you feel stuck in certain unhealthy patterns, then there are many qualified individual counselors in Nashville to help you with your needs.  Chris Roberts at Two Trees Counseling Nashville can assist you in finding the right therapist for you to help you get moving and feel healthy again.