You Are The Sum Of Your Parts
Written by: Charlotte Parish, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
We live in an instant World. Everything is fast-paced and immediate. If I want something I don’t need to wait, I can pay more for next day delivery, or even same day delivery.
There’s been a trend of this instant result transferring to therapy. Not needing to know what’s been before, only in the here and now and what can be in the future.
You are the sum of your parts. You are shaped by your interactions with those who were around you during vital developmental stages, by what was happening in your environment and how you learned to adapt in order to survive. This information is stored in your thinking brain (cognition) and in your body (emotion).
Your here and now responses are an amalgamation of learned responses and you respond to situations and interactions with others in a way you know you will survive psychologically, a way you know has worked before and way which guarantees you’ll be ok.
Your psychological, behavioural and social adaptations are learned responses, and these may become maladaptive over time. As you are faced with new situations and new individuals, the adaptions you have learned may not meet your needs, yet they are the only way you know how to interact and function.
If these adaptations become maladaptive, you may become aware of not being happy, of not feeling fulfilled, or of not functioning in a way that you would like to but not knowing how to change. This is often a time when individuals seek therapy.
Often, I come across references to the need for therapy being a long process being an outdated view, to the understanding of individual history being a cliché and I’ve experienced this within my own work. I can see clients become uncomfortable when I ask about their familial relationships, not wanting to place blame on parental relationships. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons for gaining family history and is perpetuated by quick-fix solutions that do not pay relevance to the whole Self. If individuals need to know why, they will need to gain an awareness and understanding of their whole self, not only their current Self.
You are the sum of your parts. Your experience has shaped who are today. There does not need to be blame attached to this, this is your experience, and becoming aware of your own experience is fundamental in understanding your learned responses, coping mechanisms and styles of interaction.
Some of these processes feel innate; feel as though they are who you are, because they have become a part of your unconscious and subconscious process. Bringing these processes into your conscious awareness takes time and can be challenging, and sometimes time is a necessity in enabling a safe and lasting process of change. Sometimes, revisiting traumatic experiences is not safe, and individual adaptations have enabled dissociation from these experiences to protect the conscious brain. This is exactly when therapy takes time, and there are specific and important reasons why. Psychotherapy does not take a long time for any other reason than a safe process. Your brain is expertly evolved in protection and survival and has enabled every individual who has sought therapy to survive. Enabling a choice to change involves bringing difficult processes into conscious awareness, a process which in itself can be difficult and needs empathic and compassionate inquiry to enable safe and long-lasting change.
Charlotte Parish, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Charlotte runs Start Something Counselling and Psychotherapy, a private practice in Hove UK. She has a BSc (Hons) and MSc in Psychology and has completed advanced training in Transactional Analysis (TA) Psychotherapy. TA is a theory of personality, social interaction and communication.
Charlotte has extensive clinical experience working with individuals who are dependent on substances and alcohol and understands the complex interaction between substance use and emotional discomfort.
Using TA, alongside other psychotherapeutic modalities Charlotte enables clients across presentations to become more aware of their internal world and together they are able to build awareness and understanding in order to facilitate change.
