Two Ways To Be Your Own Therapist

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I probably fit the stereotypical therapist blueprint. I had a traumatic childhood, spent the best part of my adolescence trying to rescue and fix everyone, dabbled in the unrequited love scene in early adulthood and then I married and became a mother and realised that I no longer had the energy to live life like I had been.

I probably fit the stereotypical yoga teacher blueprint for all the same reasons too! But with the added force of source behind me and the inability to put up with my own excuses anymore.

I had person-centred therapy as a teenager and dipped back in for a tune-up during my first pregnancy, but my desire for therapeutic holding is now for powerful deep dives. I don’t say this lightly, I have very much learned how to be my own therapist in the day-today because of the standard of care I was given as a teenager and always knew I was going to learn the skills required to pay it forward.

Person-centred therapy changed my life and set me up for life. All stellar therapy does. And in my three years of training as a Psychotherapist I can say without hesitation that being witness to the way people transform themselves in my presence is still one of the most beautiful encounters I have on the face of this earth.

Relational depth is the holy grail of therapy – it exudes the kind of non-possessive love that scarcely exists in the real world – that is why the alchemy of therapy + great therapist + client who has reached their personal thresholds is dynamite to the things that are blocking you from realising your full potential and fully functioning in your life.

But here’s the thing. As a therapist I was frustrated by my reach. One to one work is essential of course but the telling bit only begins once the client actually leaves the room. All therapists know that the best outcome measure for therapy is what the client does in-between sessions. No 50-minute session in the world can unpick a whole week of rerunning your unconscious programs.

And since life is what happens in-between I have been determined to develop a method of soul-inquiry that holds my clients process, purpose and path until they see me again.

That is why The Lunar Labyrinth & The Threshold Method have been born. They walk with you once you walk away from the bosom of therapy and re-enter a world that implies you have many possible paths to choose. This method frees you to walk the path that has been divined for you and is exclusively and uniquely curated for the feminine aspect of womanhood and its unique rhythms and sensibilities, giving you the containment and container to radically repurpose your emotions in order to give your feelings, desires and passions unrestrained access to the life you’ve always wanted to live.
 
Self- Therapy Lesson One
You change your life, not your therapist.

Most people come to therapy expecting the therapist to sort them out, provide answers or prescribe solutions. But the great news is that through the process of being unconditionally accepted and prized you will connect to a place within you that no longer seeks solutions as the answer to life’s challenges and replace them with a steady and deep-seated resilience.

Therapists work to manage and explore their client’s expectations as responsibly as possible while offering a kind of therapeutic atmosphere that lets you breathe a new and life-giving kind of air.

The expectation that you are fixable belies the truth that there is nothing in fact broken about you or your life.

The expectation that there is stuff you need to figure out before you can feel better belies the truth that you can feel better right now without the explanations and answers you’ve put between you and your well-being.

The expectation that you must “find yourself” belies the truth that you are never ever lost.

Let me digress…

I had something akin to a spiritual awakening when my first daughter was born 6 years ago. Everything suddenly became clear to me and the fierceness of my mama-spirit was a shock even to me.

To put it politely I had always been a sassy and soulful mini-adult. My mum recalls fearing the kind of questions that would come out of my mouth, and later the kind of iron will that she could do nothing but bend to.

But Motherhood has extricated me from the cancer of covert narcissistic abuse (That’s a whole other Trilogy) and set a cause in motion that has the momentum of a thundering freight train.

The early years of life with my daughter stripped me bare. There was no more hiding for what I had long known and while the details here are important for now they are not relevant.

The point is, I had never been lost, nor was there anything to find or figure out despite all of those mental constructs being regular players in my inner emotional ping pong tournaments. The matter of needing to return home to my truth was however the seed of my ultimate transformation.

Training as a therapist, being part of large group encounters, intimate and up-close encounters and intense one to one supervisory encounters plus working with clients at depth has the effect of a vast window opening in your mind, in which both your ultimate humanity and divinity come pouring in.

It opened me up to a radically new and profoundly humbling way of being in the world.

Suffice it to say in the midst of such revelations the need to protect my daughter brought home the very real need there was (and always had been) to protect myself from a pervasive and diffuse ambient abuse which was so multifarious it was completely invisible to the untrained eye – my eye however could pick it out blindfolded in any “Where’s Wally” scene. The wolf in sheep’s clothing analogy doesn’t come close to describing the kind of psychic and emotional threat I’d always been under. Anyone who has experienced this kind of presence in their life will know the kind of crazy-making, reality-distorting mind games that infects the water supply of your existence. Everything was laced with it. A lethal concoction of quiet character assassinating poison seeping slowly into the unspoken, thinly veiled and implied.

But let’s just say, when everywhere you turn and in every ounce of recall you have there is nothing but vague and blurry fragments of normalized madness and chaos you begin to realise that maybe those silent hunches and feelings ranging from low-grade ill-ease to full blown terror were despite your better judgement not things you should have been tricked into disbelieving.

Of course, like anyone who extricates themselves from the dark forces that have been working unchallenged in their lives, the slow and sudden re-emergence of the light becomes, for some, an unwelcome presence.

It is bitter sweet that the light swallows the darkness with obliterating force, because in my case it has wiped out vast chunks of the life that I knew, but in its place is the kind of peace and safety that I hadn’t dared dream of before my daughter arrived. I didn’t even allowed myself to believe it was possible.

But here’s what I know. Attempts on your emotional life by those who cut you loose to the wilderness and the dark in hopes that you will sink or crawl back forget your beauty and strength was carved out of their hell.

I’ve yet to meet anyone stronger than the woman I have become as a result of the shit I have picked myself up from and walked through. And I want you to be the strongest woman you know too. In fact, I won’t stop, can’t stop until these words are as true for you as they are for me.

Deciding to play it safe or play along with the people in your life that are toxic and damaging won’t ever serve you no matter how much you try to convince yourself that sitting tight is a viable option. Of course, the caveat here is that there was a time when all of those modes of survival did in fact keep you in some degree of warped safety. But if you are here reading this you know that cutting yourself free is now the only option available to you.

And that’s where I got to around the time that I decided that enough was enough. It was roughly 6 months after the birth of my second daughter by the time I was resilient and supported enough to know confidently that I could withstand the considerable amount of shit that was heading my way just by saying NO MORE to the abuse I had been living with.
 
Self-Therapy Lesson Two
Having Enough is not the same as Giving Up.

The truth is that by the time we have had enough what we are actually quitting is the years upon years of giving up on ourselves and what we always needed.

You are not giving up on a situation that you could have ridden out a little longer or done anything to change.

In truth by finally having enough of a situation you simultaneously have the renewed capacity to never give up hope (on you or the other human collateral damage)

It does mean however that you’ll need to get used to the fact that the only safe way you can fully love certain people is from afar....
 
And for the rest I reserve the right to love full tilt...

Here's what I know...

I am a child of starry heaven and I come to you first as that eternal and mysterious force of nature. My soul has come into this life to rock the contrast that once threatened to break me. I have let my life lessons guide me to be the kind of woman-human that can hold you in the highest regard and walk beside you as you walk yourself back towards the light. My therapeutic training lets me stand on the solid ground you too will come to feel underneath your feet and together we will build you from the ground up… seed, soil, soul and spirit.

This and every moment is your Threshold – your transformation unfolding – everything you need and called in is here right now for you.

Your limitations are a combustible force when you let all the truth bombs of your soul drop.

I'm going all the way, are you coming with me?

​You can begin right here by clicking the button below!

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Threshold Method First Steps

All my love from The Threshold, Clare