Life & Therapy

Today I’ve got old houses on my mind. I think that fixing up an old house has many parallels to therapy. In an old house, you have no idea what you might find behind the walls, and you may put off any sort of project until something breaks. Perhaps you call an electrician because your light switch has stopped working. When the electrician shows up and gets to the work behind the wall, she may find that the problem is in the wiring. Whoever wired the light did so in a way that is not to code, and is a fire danger, and now you need to rewire everything. Suddenly the project becomes more complicated, and you wish that you didn’t know what you now know, even if being unconscious of this problem meant that you were in danger. You may even have had your suspicions, but as long as all the lights were turning on, you could push those suspicions aside and ignore it all. So, you agree to fixing the wiring, and you invest a good chunk of money into the project, which takes more time than you thought it would. But when it is finished, every time you turn on that light switch, you are feeling confident that everything working the way it was meant to, and you don’t have to wonder just what is behind those walls, or whether what’s behind can go awry and hurt you.
Emotional work is very similar. We may be “wired” in a way that got us through a difficult childhood, but it may no longer be working for us in our adult lives. It could even be that our old wiring is dangerous, attracting us to unhealthy relationships or life situations. The work we need to do to re-wire ourselves can be scary, can involve a lot of emotional investment and time. When we get started, we may wish we could go back to a time when we didn’t know all these uncomfortable things about ourselves. But in the end, we are rewarded with the confidence that we know and trust what is inside of ourselves.