(Note: Meri Wallace, LCSW, is a guest writer, and the author of the newly published The Secret World of Children: Why Your Kids Behave the Way They Do, and also of Birth Order Blues: How Parents Can Help their Children Meet the Challenges of their Birth Order.)

How can you make changes to create a happier, more fulfilling life? Whether you’re a 60-year-old woman who wants to leave her marriage and sees no way out, a retired 66-year-old who doesn’t know what to do with the rest of his life, or an angry 49-year-old who wants to control his temper, but doesn’t know how, there is a way to make these changes. How do you begin? The answer is seeking help. Psychotherapy can change your life.

Articles abound expounding the potential benefits of therapy. This inner work can help you feel better and achieve your goals. People frequently share about how much they’re being helped by it. Yet some people hesitate to make a move to seek help, even if they are miserable. Why is this?

Some people fear that if they seek psychological help, it means they’re crazy. Some folks are afraid they’ll discover bad things about themselves. Others feel they may actually change their life for the worse. Others may have the idea that they ought to be able to fix their emotional problems on their own. But let’s say you have a terrible toothache. You would never think of filling your own cavity. You would go to a dentist who is skilled in fixing teeth. Similarly, psychotherapists are highly skilled in understanding people’s emotional lives.

Psychotherapy: A Powerful, Life-Changing Process

The goal of psychotherapy is to help you regain parts of yourself that may have been cut off from your consciousness. As you unconditionally accept more parts of yourself, you feel more whole as you become a positive, loving, and nurturing person to yourself. Then you move forward feeling happier in life, freer to build successful relationships and fulfil your dreams.

Psychotherapy may be the key to make the changes you long for in your life. It can help you feel better every day. Eating well, exercising, and meditation can bring positive changes. You may discover that psychotherapy will bring about deep, comprehensive, and long-lasting benefits.

The Basic Premise

The basic premise of psychotherapy is simple: the way you think, feel, react, and behave in the present is caused by your early childhood experiences. For instance, someone whose mother wasn’t emotionally available could go through life feeling sad and hungry for attention. They may panic in relationships, because they constantly fear abandonment. Or a child whose parent was abusive may feel enraged. Such a person could endlessly battle with their bosses and friends. They may have continuous problems forming intimate relationships.

Painful feelings as a child over negative interactions with parents or traumatic events such as a death or divorce can plague people later in life and cause them great unhappiness. To cope with the pain of these experiences, a child defensively pushes such feelings out of their mind into their unconscious.

Overcoming Defense Mechanisms

In psychological terms, a child develops defense mechanisms such as: (1) denial (refusing to acknowledge that they have any emotional reactions), (2) repression (feelings are pushed down so deep that the person cannot contact feelings of anger and sadness), or (3) reaction formation (the individual changes their feelings to an opposite, more acceptable emotion). Basically, a person cuts off their emotional pain to protect themself.

Learn the Power of Your Unconscious

Unconscious feelings and painful memories rattle inside a person and continue to cause pain. You may frequently feel depressed, anxious, angry, or resentful. Yet you’re unable to identify the cause or emotion. This lack of self-knowledge leaves you feeling vulnerable and without control. Once more, the unconscious feelings and memories govern your behavior, often negatively.

For instance, if you had an abusive parent, you may choose similar relationships. Why? For this reason: you’re attempting to change your partner into a kind, loving parental figure. Similarly, you may find yourself unhappy about a certain type of recurring relationship. You may never grasp how and why you keep getting into the same situation until your life changes.

Effects of Internalization 

Commonly, people internalize their parent/child relationship. As a result, they often treat themselves in a similar way their parents may have treated them. Consequently, their parent’s voice may actually become their internal dialogue or self-talk. This may have become the way they think and feel about themselves.

If a parent treated them positively and spoke lovingly, their inner voice will be kind and supportive. This person’s inner voice might tell them, “You’re good. You can do this. Don’t worry.” They are able to see themself as valuable.

However, if a parent was critical or rejecting, they may unconsciously see themself in another way. For instance, your parents may frequently have used phrases like, “You’ll never amount to anything,” “You’re dumb,” or “You’re a bad child.” Later you internalize these unconscious negative inner dialogues, and they can continue to affect you throughout your life. You may frequently chastise yourself if you make a mistake, because that’s what your parents did. Yet you still unconsciously long for their approval.

Here’s another possibility: you may often project negative feelings about yourself onto others. If your child has a messy room, and as a child you were labelled a slob, you may overreact and scream at your child, never knowing why.

Psychotherapy Is Talk Therapy

Here is the way psychotherapy helps people. Psychotherapy is talk therapy. Words are keys to unlock feelings and memories from the unconscious, so a person’s inner life becomes accessible and begins to change. In each session, the client talks about issues or situations that are bothering them. For example, say they are not getting along with their partner or they feel depressed. The therapist listens and, based on his or her training, experience, and skills in understanding people’s unconscious motivations, the therapist reflects what they are hearing through interpretation.

For example, when a client talks about screaming out of control at his son because he got a bad grade, the therapist might elucidate with something like this: “It seems that when your child gets a bad grade in school, you’re reminded of your own problems at school. Then you get angry with your child in the same way your parents reacted to you.” This knowledge can help a parent step back, separating their past from the present: “My child is not me, and I am not my parent.” The client comes to realize the connection and starts to react more objectively to their child.

Conclusion

Identifying an emotion and linking it to an early childhood experience is challenging and often hard to do on our own. People become habituated to banning such experiences from consciousness. Changing these patterns often takes time and strength. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, talked about the process one undertakes to slowly peel one layer away at a time, as we do when preparing an onion. Step by step, this process reveals our genuine motivation to us.

Even though it takes time, the process of labelling an emotion brings relief and change. When you discover that your basic understanding of today’s events is linked to the connection with earlier experiences, you begin to feel more powerful and in control. Therefore, the therapist helps you uncover your past while teaching you how to actively and positively communicate in all your relationships in a lasting way.