What happens in therapy sessions is installed in the collective imagination. On the one hand, there is the idea that it is about going to touch on painful issues from the past that we cannot do anything about, since what happened cannot be changed. On the other hand, It is seen as a space in which it is necessary to touch those points of our history in order to transform them and transform ourselves.
The truth is that as paradoxical as it may seem, both perceptions are correct. It is impossible to change any event from the past itself, so it would give the idea of a certain frustration when exposing those feelings and facts that ultimately cannot be modified; What happens is that those memories that are repressed determine our current emotional state without us being able to know about it.
What does the self-exploration process in therapy consist of?
The search in therapy consists of building our story WITH respect to what happened to us or what we did at a certain moment, to being able to explain to ourselves what happened and what we would have wanted to happen. This attempts to see at what points in our lives there were moments of great emotional impact, moments that can only be remembered in the therapy itself, and to be able to achieve a change in our subjective position not only with respect to the past, but also to current situations. , everyday, in which we see that we repeat patterns of behavior that make us distress or inhibit our actions that we perhaps want to do.
That is to say, here the events of our history are being considered as nodal points where subsequent emotional reactions to future situations that we have to live take shape. Although, as we are arguing, It is always from the present that it is possible to speak of the past that returns each time under new repetitions where life makes us encounter those moments where we see “the same thing happening again.”
Therefore, it is from those situations that affect us now that it is possible to build their causes, giving rise to a spiral movement where by working on the present the past is elaborated and vice versa. Freud compared the work of psychoanalysis to a clock pendulum that goes from past to present and from present to past constantly.
Examining the meaning of our past
Returning to one of the many paths that are built in psychoanalytic therapy, let us remember that it is necessary to resignify what happens to us and although according to certain situations, reflections… it is possible to become aware on our own of something that until now we could not see, it is worth saying that the therapy framework is designed to give rise to that emergence of new thoughts that make us see the situation differently.
And if there is something characteristic that these psychic formations, such as memories, for example, have, it is that several meanings are hidden behind them and not just one. Again with Freud, these are the so-called “covering memories” since behind them there are a variety of affects that gather in it in order to keep certain sensations hidden that at the moment are not allowed to come to light.
The memory functions as a mask for the feelings behind it. So, the idea of resignifying consists of experiencing that things are not in themselves, they do not have a single meaning when it comes to the emotional world. By understanding it, the situation is discovered in a new way, it is no longer presented with the emotional weight that it had until then, since there is a new variety of thoughts that make their way when overcoming that emotional resistance and the burden that was gathered in a A single thought is released into a new way of perceiving reality.
Of course These processes are not immediate consists of certain moments of question, reflection and construction in which one builds oneself with what one elaborates about oneself and perhaps one will not be able to have an answer to the discomfort in a short time, because as we said, that cloudy and confusing discomfort It conceals several realities, but by giving them another meaning than the original, the process itself becomes calming until fundamental points of the construction are touched upon where it is no longer necessary to return there except to learn from oneself and continue growing as a human being, with everything that entails.
