The process towards healing has many names and many theories. To me, the therapeutic process is the journey towards healing a psychological wound. How do we begin to heal what we cannot see? This question has echoed through time and filled the pages of countless books — from science to spirituality, from philosophy to art. The search for healing crosses every boundary we’ve drawn between disciplines.
Just like physical wounds, psychological wounds hurt. And in response to that pain, we often find ways to protect ourselves:
- Our awareness may shut down when something becomes too painful to face.
- We disconnect from our true selves.
- We developed ways of coping with the pain because it is too painful to feel it.
To heal, we need to gently turn toward what we once had to turn away from. Healing is the process of seeing our wounds, reconnecting with our authentic selves, feeling and processing our pain, and releasing the coping strategies that once helped us but now hold us back.
Parts of the therapeutic process
Despite the many paths to healing, there are a few core elements that seem to be at the heart of every healing process. These three components form the foundation of my personal roadmap for understanding the therapeutic process and healing.
- Gaining Awareness – Becoming more conscious.
- Identity Integration – Developing an authentic sense of self and creating a relationship with parts of us we have disowned.
- Healing Psychological and Emotional Wounds – Feeling painful emotions, having corrective experiences, and ultimately liberating ourselves from old patterns.
In therapy, these three parts are explored alongside each other, as they naturally come up, because they are interconnected. Notice that I write parts, not phases, because this process doesn’t happen in a rigid sequence. It’s a process, not a protocol. When it comes to matters that involve us and the context we live in, the exact steps and timeline do not just depend on us. We can hold that in mind and also acknowledge that much remains within our power.
Gaining Awareness
We can’t heal what we’re not conscious of. A key part of the therapeutic process is to:
- Become more conscious of your personality traits, behaviors, and thought patterns, including the unconscious ones, so you can better understand what’s really driving you.
- Recognize what personality traits and behaviors are authentic to you, and which ones you’ve developed as a way to stay safe or protect yourself from pain.
- Understand how what happened in your past still affects you today.
- Identify emotional and traumatic wounds.
Identity Integration
Identity integration is the process of bringing together all the parts of who you are into a coherent, grounded, and authentic sense of self. We need to be internally aligned, for our outer life (our relationships, career, lifestyle, etc) to reflect that alignment. This integration involves:
- Living in Integrity
- Embodying the personality traits and skills that are authentic to you.
- Living in alignment with your values and what you care about.
- Cultivating a sense of self that is consistent across all areas of your life.
- Creating a relationship with the parts of you that you have disowned.
- There are parts of us we have rejected and deemed unacceptable. When we cast them into our shadow, they manifest in more subtle ways (the people we cannot stand, the people we gravitate towards, moments where we act “out-of-character”, the things we want to hide, etc). It is these very parts, the ones we have made “not us”, that we need to see.
- Living from your center
- Your sense of self is your center. Living from your center means staying at the center of your own orb, rather than being swayed and orbiting around whatever is around you.
- Developing a healthy self-esteem.
- Being connected with your own worth and recognizing the equal value of others, without feeling inferior or superior.
Healing Psychological and Emotional Wounds
Healing begins when our pain is seen and felt, and it deepens as the defenses we once needed to cope with the pain begin to soften and are, ultimately, released. For this to happen, it is necessary to have new emotional experiences in our relationships.
Feeling painful emotions
Where there is pain, there is a wound. And for the pain to be released, it must be felt. This can be incredibly difficult because it means allowing ourselves to feel intense emotions and physical sensations that we would rather avoid. So many of our coping strategies are built around avoiding pain (staying busy, distracting ourselves, drinking, etc). But as long as we are driven by the urge to avoid pain, healing remains out of reach.
Liberation from Old Patterns
Knowledge in itself is not transformative. What is transformative is the release of the defenses we developed as a result of what happened to us.
- From coping to avoid pain → Learning to cope by regulating ourselves and navigating unpleasant emotions.
- From resisting vulnerability → To embracing it, even with the risk of being hurt again.
- From being unattuned to your needs → To recognizing them and taking steps to meet them.
- From being on autopilot, driven by old patterns → To making conscious choices that align with who you are and where you want to be.
Emotional Corrective Experiences
In order to change a well-ingrained pattern, we need to have new emotional experiences in our relationships. When we expect a negative outcome (such as being criticized, shamed or ignored) and that doesn’t happen, we learn that it is safe to expose ourselves. This knowledge does not come from insight, but from lived experience, which is what ultimately allows a wound to scar over. It was the absence of this positive experience that caused the wound in the first place.
It is important to understand that we will still feel pain and go through hardship. That is part of life and of being human. The difference lies in being able to go through it while staying connected to ourselves, without hurting ourselves further.
Kazu Saito