The meaning of psychotherapy has not changed for more than a hundred years - to become aware of what is happening in the unconscious and to reconcile consciousness with what is happening in the unconscious in order to have greater freedom. It is known that the unconscious controls us. If we are aware of something, then we acquire the ability to change how we act with what we are aware of.

It is unconscious processes that determine how we live, therefore awareness is one of the main tools of psychotherapy.

Consciousness redefines the processes that occur within us. Of course, the symbols that the client observes in his inner world differ from the symbols of the psychotherapist. Essentially, the psychotherapist is an explorer of a psychological reality completely different from his own. As if he could examine individual parts of someone else's apartment, immersed in darkness, onto which the beam of a client's flashlight falls. The light shed into the darkness is what the client tells about his psychological reality. And when a ray of light falls on some event, this event is redefined in a new way, essentially changing the past experience.

Awareness is placing yourself under the beam of your attention. Awareness can be considered a process that shapes reality, rather than simply exploring it. How can it be? After all, consciousness operates with existing ideas about reality. However, if you look at these ideas - images - in more detail, you will notice that they all consist of small components - physical discomfort, emotional reactions, fragments of thoughts.

Consciousness assembles a complete image from these elements, and the assembly process depends little on consciousness, but is controlled by the unconscious. It is like a person who eats chicken without asking himself how much chemical it contains, what it was fed and where it was raised.

It is awareness that helps to disassemble our holistic experience into elements. Observing the flow of emotional and physical sensations that make up experience. Our thinking is structured in such a way that, to save energy, it simplifies any contradictions to the detriment of reliability when analyzing elements, cutting off those meanings that do not fit into our usual pattern of behavior. 

Since the conscious is determined by the unconscious, which cannot be realized in the normal state, then in order to become aware you need to switch to another mode. This regime should prolong the state of contradiction and uncertainty, when there is nothing to rely on except what is happening. 

Personal development occurs only when it is based on experience, even if this experience is traumatic, which is why it is so difficult to change behavior patterns. Past traumatic experiences tend to repeat themselves until they end, but they cannot end because conditions have changed. The need for attachment, unsatisfied in childhood, cannot be satisfied in a symbolic way, thus disappointment is born.

The therapist, like a good parent, creates a therapeutic field for the client to extract meanings without directly satisfying the client's needs.

Psychic defenses relieve the tension of uncertainty too quickly, preventing new meanings from being born. Thus, defenses reduce the threshold of intolerance to excitement. In neurotic personality disorders, the neurotic immediately gives form to the experience that could happen, thereby blocking its occurrence. 

In psychotherapy, one must rely precisely on the process of decomposition of the experiences that make up the experience, that is, on the process itself, allowing the tension to remain a little more than usual, which in turn is a prerequisite for the emergence of new experience or the emergence of new meanings that redefine the already conscious reality.  The fear that accompanies this process is based on the habitual way of perceiving experience, which is destroyed, as if threatening the existence of the client’s personality. Overcoming fear and awareness of experiences as elements of experience makes psychotherapy for building new experiences and meanings successful.

If you are ready to become seriously aware of your experiences, I invite you  for psychotherapy online. I work in a method called positive cross-cultural psychotherapy. Positive psychotherapy is a psychodynamic humanistic approach that allows one to recognize personality conflicts and successfully resolve them in short-term therapy. Click on the button below to make an appointment.

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