In our society, we still have a very medical view of mental health. We talk about illness, treatment and diagnoses. Diagnoses can be helpful: they put a name to what we might be feeling and perhaps lead us to treatments that can help ease our suffering.
But often diagnoses can become labels and encourage us to think that what we’re feeling is something fixed and unchanging, inherent features of our personalities. Or we can think that whatever we’re experiencing is evidence that we, or our brains, are broken in some way and that we need to be fixed or cured.
The truth is that suffering is part of being human and sometimes we need help to understand and withstand that suffering, whatever its source.
Therapy looks to individuals’ particular experience of their environment, their relationships, their inner thoughts and outward behaviours to understand what ails them and why. As Jonathan Shedler says, understanding how the fabric is woven and how it can be rewoven, is often the focus of the work that we do together in therapy.
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