Psychotherapy Blogbriefs is about my experiences, learnings, discoveries, thoughts and suggestions as a therapist in Santa Fe over the past 18 years, and as a human during the course of my life.
There is a felt terror that underlies many common efforts to avoid contact with the deeper dimensions of the self. This can be called the existential terror surrounding death - or, more descriptively, I think, the sense that one will disappear, and cease to exist - or the terror which attends early experiences of neglect or abandonment by primary caregivers (which is, after all, the reflection of the very real possibility, known by the body in its wisdom, of its own demise). However one wishes to name it, this terror is a primal experience which requires a certain direct attention, and even some significant degree of conscious surrender or acceptance, on the way to re-establishing the total commitment to and reconnection to oneself that will be the basis for psychological integrity.
It is terrifying to approach this core, and the prospect is often associated with a belief that one will be swallowed up by the immensity of the experience. This fear is an exaggeration. One does not disappear, but one is transformed, which may be tantamount to the same thing in one sense at least. Who one has experienced oneself to be may indeed change very significantly.
In other words, with the proper understanding and the proper commitment, and, I will add, with the proper guidance and support, it is possible to approach this terror safely, and to not only survive this approach, but to learn to experience a depth of psychological freedom and wholeness that perhaps no other process will offer.
And yes, this does enter into the realm of the "spiritual", but let's not be too quick to define that realm in simple terms.
