Therapy To Distance Ourselves From Suffering: A Proposal

In the first consultation, I usually visualize people who come to therapy as being crushed by a giant stone..

This stone is unique in each of the patients, but they all have in common the brutal weight, the impossibility of getting rid of it; Sometimes the comic-book image of people dragged by a snowball, falling down the mountainside, comes to mind.

And that’s where the therapy begins: begin to put distance between the person and their suffering…

Therapies based on Mindfulness: the paradox of Mindfulness

One of the axes that therapy usually articulates has to do with acceptance: accept that suffering, or anxiety, or sadness, or recurring thoughts are going to be part of our lives, and start considering them as traveling companions. This alone makes things change. It is not resigning, it is not giving up, but it is admitting these phenomena as they are.

I remember a special case, that of someone we will call M. She looked at me strangely when I suggested becoming friends with her depression, and she later admitted that when she took this step and even “went out for a walk with her,” she realized that she stopped to have so much power in your life.

Also worth highlighting is the case of JA, who He became an expert at saying hello to his intrusive thoughts that had to do with potential misfortunes that lurked everywhere. He was able to practice kindness with them, greeting them, thanking them for his visit and saying goodbye cordially, and at that moment they stopped ruining his day.

AND This is the paradox of therapies based on acceptance and Mindfulness: the more I accept my difficulty, the less power it has over me. And vice versa: the more I try to get rid of my difficulty, the more it sticks to me and the more suffering it generates for me.

Let’s think about M., a person overcome by her thoughts: she was perfectly aware of when the thoughts took over her, but she couldn’t stop them, they “crushed” her. The attempts to distract herself, to cover them up with medication had been unsuccessful, she was really desperate.. The first step was to take a step back, to get out of the pot of thoughts in which he was steeping and to begin to see thoughts for what they are: mental events, not reality. Thus he was able to begin to recognize the thoughts, to distance himself from them, to not pay so much attention to them; He began to assume that “thoughts are not facts” and there began a crucial liberation process in his life.

Or as it happened to S., who lived in such a state of activation and hyperirritability and who was having problems in almost all areas of his life: in the family, at work, at bedtime, at eating… Introducing small pauses in his life in which he focused his attention on the body, emotions or breathing made those moments become handles. from which to begin the work of recovering moments of calm, small but increasingly frequent.

Suffering also occurs on a physical level. I fondly remember N. whose stomach flared up every time she had any problem with her partner, and just paying attention to the physical sensations and allowing her stomach to express itself caused this sensation to release and she was able to get closer. ease to your bodily sensations. As I paid attention to the body, the body became looser.he felt more and more balanced.