“Allow the raw grief and anger travel every cell of your being. Scream at the dying of the light and the injustice of the hell you were thrown into. Silence will come soon after and the wonderful healing space of integration will be born. It’s from this integrated space that you will discover the next path to walk. Trust your new found intuition which will be burned in your soul! Attracta Gill
I read this quote recently and it struck me how resonant it is with the work that I do as a therapist. So often I meet people who have been conditioned not to feel or not to express what they feel. Somehow it becomes normal to suppress and deny emotion, as if emotion were somehow dirty or bad.
I love the wholeness of the quote, the acknowledgement that after the intensity will come silence, and that from this healing and integration can follow. It’s important to know that for emotional expression to have a liberating power it needs to be embodied. We need a sense of the ground, of connectedness, to hold us as we allow the power to move through us. Without this emotion can just be distress that loops on and on, resolving little but leaving a trail of relational destruction in its path.
It is this contained, grounded expression of the intensity of what is inside that psychotherapy offers and teaches. The therapy process is intended to leave clients ready and able to contain and ground themselves, transferring the stability and balance inside. Dependence may be a fleeting stage of therapeutic work, but it should not be prolonged. Psychotherapists work always towards client wholeness and independence.
Gill notes that your next path to walk emerges from integration. It is not apparent at the start, and is probably quite obscured as you move through the powerful emotions you need to release. Intuition offers us a great deal when we can be present with it and pay attention. The benefit of learning to trust your emotional expression and to know that all will pass is integration and congruence, that sense of knowing what is right for you deep inside.
Sometimes it feels hard to let emotions move as they need to, when it has not been your habit up to now it may be uncomfortable, or even daunting. If you’d like support to expand your emotional range and to become more of who you already are, get in touch to talk about psychotherapy and how it may benefit you.
