– Why our Childhood is Important in Individual Counseling in Nashville, TN

Last Updated on October 27, 2015 by Chris Roberts

WE LEARN HOW TO LEARN IN INFANCY

Individual Counseling in Nashville TN is filled with many different avenues and tributaries.  Most people enter in to Nashville individual therapy with a specific agenda item they want to work on and goals of how they can make their life better.  Some people have a vague notion of how the brain works and how emotions function in a human life.   Neither one of these are necessary for a healthy therapeutic treatment outcome, and neither of these must be understood or discussed in order to therapy to be effective.  However, whether a person is aware of the effects of these items is irrelevant to the reality that they do play a vital role in helping a person become more whole.

Most experienced individual therapists in Nashville won’t make a person sit down and go through a lecture to more fully understand how the brain works and how emotions function.  Some individual therapists will, and depending on the client, it could be the most therapeutic approach for that person.  This article concerns the beauty and oftentimes unquestioned manner in which people learn how to engage the world in which they live!

If you’ve ever sat with a child who is just learning to talk, or hasn’t yet learned to speak, it is a truly fascinating experience.  Questions like: Why would a child go through the pain and difficulty of learning how to walk when they can already move quite efficiently with crawling?  How do they KNOW, that the short term frustration of learning to walk will pay off in the end with faster and more efficient mobility?  As adults, we can’t explain this to them, just as much as their brains can’t understand the concept of delayed gratification.

As such, individual therapy in Tennessee is just as fascinated in understanding why people act and behave in the manner in which they do.  Most people have very good reasons for doing the things they do, even if the results are not what they claim they want.  The best way to understand why a person acts the way they do is understanding how they came to learn this pattern of behavior.  And of course, most people learn their most basic patterns of behavior in childhood.  Further, most people learn these behaviors before they can even speak!  For example, a two year old child finds her mommy’s expensive necklace accidentally lying on the coffee table.  The child instinctively picks the shiny, new jewel up and begins inspecting it.  At the same time, the mother walks into the room and shouts, “No, no, no.  Honey, give that to mommy RIGHT NOW.”  The child becomes frightened and runs with the necklace in hand.  The mother chases the little girl, grabs her from behind and yanks the necklace from her hand.  As the child throws herself into a fit, because of the lost treasure, the mother scampers back to the jewelry box to secure the necklace.  Of course, the mother returns to hold and comfort the little girl, usually with a lecture of the importance of the jewel.  As an outsider looking in on this hypothetical example, it’s easy to see all the things the mother did wrong.  But in day to day life, stories just as these happen in even the best of childhoods and with the best of parents.

Individual counseling consists of a place where people can begin to unpack the simple stories like this that happened over and over again.  These stories, as regular and routine as they may seem, become the backbone of the hardwiring that makes our brains and emotions function.  If, as people, we don’t allow such simple stories as this to inform our lives, then it will become destined to repeat these seemingly innocuous situations to our loved ones and little ones.  Of course, a two year old that can’t speak is highly unlikely to remember this story.  However, the patterns that contributed to this mother’s behavior and the patterns that were established in the little girl’s life based on this example are indicative of ways of relating to our loved ones.

In individual counseling in Nashville, Tennessee, no story is too small or too insignificant.  Every story tells a greater story that in it’s fullness describes who we are and how we came to be.  If you are looking for a more full or healthy life, then knowing your childhood is an important factor in helping you move forward with vibrancy.