Discovering Clarity and Embracing Your True Self
The process of therapy begins when you make the decision to reach out and make the initial contact. This is not an easy action, but it is a meaningful step and a pivotal moment. Allowing another person to listen and interact around issues that you have found difficult can be a stretch and invoke embarrassment or a defensive feeling.
Finding the right Therapist fit is important and a challenge, especially when one needs assistance due to feelings of depression, anxiety, or woundedness. The choice of whom to work with calls for listening to your internal voice. After initial searches, followed by a conversation or meeting, that ‘inner voice’ can make the choice for you to go forward with someone that you feel ‘gets’ it.
We are all aware that we have potential, and are doing what we can with it, but does it not seem enough? I know that we all have the serious ability and wish to grow, to heal pain and live in recovery, to open paths that have been elusive or locked in, frustrating, and painful. Perhaps there is behavior that we know is not useful or healthy but fail to be able to release.
There is work consisting of going in a safe and structured way to find the reasons and path to change at your pace.
What is therapy?
Styles of therapy have a lot of names, titles and theories, but the basis of a therapy session is to discover what and how one works, get to know and tolerate feelings that may even have been hidden, and look at alternatives for finding relief and peace and energy.
The work fosters tolerance and care for one’s actual feelings, going safely toward the ability to know and accept and benefit from them, even fear and sadness. Your therapist keeps the safe space for this process and ‘gets it’ as the dialog is created, sometimes following and sometimes posing questions, all with the aim of the journey toward your free self.
The aim is building clarity, freedom, release of self-criticism, opening of energy, claiming your place and claiming boundaries! In all, having a better relationship with, connection with, and knowing of Self. Of course- this improves connection with others and the world!How Kristin Moore works
The major modes of therapy that I call upon can be called a combination of psychoanalytic, where we look at past influences, and cognitive, where we look to change current thinking and behavior. Perched in the eaves are a panoply of additional approaches, a short list being: Interpersonal, Narrative, Gestalt, Self-Psychology, Somatic Experience, NLP, Bioenergetic, Attachment, Meditation, Positive, and so on.
There are many others that, over time, I have examined to look for insights and commonalities that make sense. The most interesting of which is EMDR, in which I have trained and qualified.
The acronym translates as ‘Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing,’ a method of rewiring the brain, especially good for trauma. Even the preamble to the process is useful to safely address deep feelings and I call upon it when deemed useful.
The list is long, but good to call upon and mix as fits each situation, and I develop a specific and personal amalgam for each person that I work with as we progress.
There is a dialogue as my style is conversational: questions, history, listening, sensing, associating, suggesting, testing out, sitting still, waiting for clarity, agreeing, disagreeing, moving through the facts and story to the core- moving gently toward fear, pain, and through this toward relief, clarity and freedom of self.
Therapy is derived from the Latin ‘curing’ or ‘healing’ and I see it as such, but I do not work on curing in a medical sense at all (although medical problems can coexist or be a result of psychological problems) but in the sense of re-finding the spirit of the person, moving toward the intrinsic self which was already always being. This is not pop-psych, but the result of years and years of study and therapeutic work to change and what I have gained in my own recovery.
A therapist is a
Listener
Regaining Wholeness Through Insight and Growth
No judgment is given, but sharing of tools and the opening of insight and awareness of self and story all work toward regaining a whole self.
Stage 1: Building the Path Together
In the beginning, some information will be shared across a possibly broad range, and the direction of the work will be determined. It may be strange to be telling your life to a stranger, but there is no judgment, and together, you are constructing the path for investigation and change. It is emotional “detective work,” and evidence is being collected. This is all at your own pace, with deep and careful listening.
Stage 2: Exploring Patterns and Unlocking Freedom
At that pace, we go forward toward the center of what emerges as stuck places, roadblocks or central patterns, and explore further, looking at patterns and options. Along the way, perhaps discovering wishes, fears, or other pivotal deep feelings to work through and attend to in the service of more clarity, peace and towards freedom.
Step 3: Uncovering Fear to Foster Change
The onward, inward progression of work is towards tolerance and acceptance of fear, as that is the underlying core of so many manifestations- chief of which is anxiety, attaching itself to myriad other aspects of life. Depression, inability to concentrate, overworking, ill temper, isolation, sleeplessness- and others will include looking for fears, expectations, wishes, and all kinds of personal interactions are affected by fear. So, all these may come into awareness for investigation together and are on the path to change.