Every Sunday I enjoy reading the new entries to the blog of the Post Secret project. Yesterday, this secret was posted:
Variations on this theme of not talking in therapy about real and troubling issues are very common. And becoming willing to actually say whatever comes to mind is certainly one of the major tasks in therapy -- becoming willing to let go of pride and shame and all the other judgements and obstacles to allowing all of what we are to show to one other human being.
Here is the big question -- what is the point of therapy, of making the financial sacrifice that therapy entails, if you hold back who you are, what really bothers you? Withholding like this does not protect the therapist nor does whether or not you reveal it make a difference in her life. Your therapy is about you. And be willing to reveal yourself, even the messy ugly shameful parts can and indeed likely will change your life.
So what is the point of therapy if not to open it all up?
Not that it won't take some struggles to get there. It isn't easy to let go of the prisons we confine ourselves in.
The inferior and even the worthless belongs to me as my shadow and give me substance and mass. How can I be substantial without casting a shadow? I must have a dark side too if I am to be whole; and by becoming conscious of my shadow I remember once more that I am a human being like any other. At any rate, if this rediscovery of my own wholeness remains private, it will only restore the earlier condition from which the neurosis, i.e., the split-off complex, sprang. Privacy prolongs my isolation and the damage is only partially mended. But through confession I throw myself into the arms of humanity again, freed at last from the burden of moral exile. The goal ... is not merely the intellectual recognition of the facts with the head, but their confirmation by the heart and the actual release of suppressed emotion (Jung, CW 16, p134)