Therapy and Motherhood
Therapy is like motherhood.
Odd, irregular metaphor? Let’s take a look.
On the day my youngest daughter, Angel, came out into the world, I was with her mother laboring for her birth.
My role as the father was merely supportive. I can’t help my wife give birth to Angel who’s inside her. No one can.
Nature’s wisdom knows it’s a mother’s space alone. If I force it myself, it harms and pisses her off.
The act of psychotherapy is by definition like motherhood.
As the mother bears in pain her child within her, so the patient in therapy groans to bring out something new from her pain.
The therapist and the mother are channels, not originators. They don’t create new life, they only bear and deliver it.
The new mother weeps in wonderment at the tiny miracle she holds in her breast. The new born came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her.
“Thank you doc, we got much better now!” says a wife after months of therapy with her husband, recovering from the devastation of infidelity.
I’d say, “It’s you and the invisible!”
When a couple in emotional pain finds healing and “new birth” in their relationship in therapy, it came out of the therapist but not from him, through the therapist but not of him.
When we see it this way, we revere heaven. The mother and the therapist and your healing life are watched over by a Higher Power, the actual originator.
If your life is a mess, has suffered loss or trauma, ask your self like a birthing mother:
What good do I feel breathing inside me amid the pain?
How do I nurture my self to bear this potential new life awaiting release?
In what ways do I set and align my self at the service of the Higher Power, to successfully bring forth this new life into the world?