Making sense of overwhelm
Making sense of your experiences is an important step on the path to recovery
Sometimes, the hardest part of emotional suffering is not knowing where it begins or ends. When we're feeling just completely overwhelmed by our emotions and by life problems it can feel like what we're dealing with is like a huge cloud of black smoke that it just completely enveloping us. The whole thing just feel horrible, and overwhelming and inescapable.
But what we're not recognising clearly at those time is that the experience of being emotionally overwhelmed by life is made up of different parts or different aspects which can include:
Stressful aspects of our current life circumstances
Fears and worries about the future
Unmet emotional needs
Unhelpful coping strategies
Addictive behaviours
An unresolved sense of injustice.
Unresolved grief
Unresolved trauma
Unhelpful comparisons with other people or with how life "should" be
I like to describe therapy (as I practise it) as having three stages: Discuss, Plan, and Transform.
The first two states of therapy (Discuss and Plan) are all about clearly identifying ALL (or as many as possible) of those different parts or aspects of what's going on in order to give us both a clear sense of the issues that we need to address. We can then decide, together, the order in which we want to address those issues using powerful change methods such as Relationship Trauma Protocol and the other BWRT protocols.
The Discuss and Plan stages are not just preparatory steps prior to the actual therapy in the Transform stage. They are a part of the therapy experience itself. They enable you to start to clearly see and understanding what's going on. Even though we have yet started the transformational work of working with the Relationship Trauma Protocol and other BWRT protocols to resolve the relationship trauma, you may already find that you are feeling less threatened and overwhelmed by your problems simply on account of understanding much more clearly what they are.
