Life & Therapy

If mice have been ensconced in your home for a while, they will become very resistant to the idea of any sort of change, especially if they have had unlimited access to food, such as that left out for your pet.  As you remove food sources and set traps, the mouse population goes down.  The closer you get to ousting them, the more determined, tricky, and tenacious the survivors will be.  Even though you have fewer mice, it may seem like there are more, because the survivors have turned into olympic evil geniuses. So, you are forced to get more creative and vigilant as they figure things out, until you’ve gotten rid of them all.

In therapy, we work very hard to change habits and behaviors that aren’t working for us.  The ones that have been ensconced for years are the hardest ones to let go of.  They don’t go quietly.  We may make great headway in becoming more loving and accepting of ourselves, when all of a sudden, it seems as if old, self-defeating behaviors race toward us at full speed.  This is similar to the mice getting more determined as they are being ousted- our old habits are feeling desperate because they know they are losing power, so they get more creative and tricky in hopes that they can stay.  

During these times, we may start to wonder if we have made any headway at all.  We’ve worked so hard on ourselves, and suddenly we’re getting all sorts of self-defeating messages from within.  Our inner critic has become an olympic evil genius who is suddenly yelling at us through a megaphone. It takes some creativity and muscle, but we can learn to tune into the quiet, true voice that is growing inside of us.  We can label the loud voice of the inner critic as that of someone who is losing power and trying desperately to hold on to it. Eventually, as we become more creative and vigilant, we can relax into our new way of being.