Clients attend sessions and speak freely. Really freely. In this way we hear a very different narrative to what we tell our friends, family and ourselves. We have to learn to speak without defence. Defence mechanisms are there to protect us from experiencing painful feeling. We needed these defences once but they no longer serve us in the present. In a nutshell, this is what Freud set out to achieve with the birth of psychoanalysis – to uncover what has been experienced as painful and is still being experienced as painful (but without our conscious knowledge of this)

The aim of speaking without censorship is not a badge of honour, or to feel like a victim, or to feel sorry for ourselves, it is to uncover what may still be effecting us without our conscious appreciation of this. This is why symptoms are formed – symptoms are the expression of what hasn’t been verbalised. When we make something conscious, the ‘energy’ is directed away from symptoms (anxiety, depression, anger, phobias, etc) and into verbal expression.

In ‘unpacking’ what has been experienced in the past, and in ‘telling’ our story, we can at last see what we need to do to bring about change. In short, we are not boxing shadows any longer but we have clear goals to work on.

Psychotherapy helps us learn about what has ‘been brushed under the carpet’ and what may have had a debilitating effect on us without ourselves being completely aware of the how and why.