therapy - its not what you think it is
About 7 years ago I was a little lost in life. Nothing too overtly wrong but I wasn't truly excited about anything. It was a bit of going through the motions of everyday life, without excitement or any level of conviction to life.
And then I met John!
John married two of my closest friends,… and then John married another couple in my friendship circle,… and then John christened the first couple’s first born.
He just kept,... well showing up in different moments of my life, within a relatively short period of time.
John is both a priest and a psychotherapist. He worked intimately with the late and great Desmond Tutu, who was often referred to as the conscience of our country.
John was one of the brave and heart working elders with Desmond Tutu during the apartheid years, doing work not many know about. He nurtured humanity when that seemed to be missing.
He is by far the most humble, courageous and gentle of men I have met in this life and I was drawn to spend more time with him, so I asked if I could have a coffee with him.
We spoke for over an hour and I felt I was in the presence of one of the most advanced beings I have occupied space around. At that point I didn't know what he had done for our country, and the bravery he had shown when hope was scarce in one of the worst fear filled periods in South Africa’s shadow history.
I knew I wanted to be around John more. He just had this thing about him. A feeling that I can only describe as a gentle reverence for life and for the vulnerability of our human experience.
I didn't have much regard for psychologists, psychotherapy and therapy in general, but I felt a nudge inside myself to do what was needed to spend more time with John, and being a therapist, I just thought - ok let me pay for a few sessions.
In my past I have actually judged psychologists very harshly.
I knew a handful of people who went to a psychologist, some for decades, and I didn’t see impactful shifts in them or more kindness. I also thought therapy was just sad, broken people who whinge about their mothers and fathers flaws.
After a few sessions with John, I began to explore myself deeper… he made it safe to.
He doesn't have an ounce of judgment in him - something I have never experienced in a human being. He created a space, safer than I had known in the presence of another human.
This space, I now realize, is his gift to not only his clients but to anyone who has the privilege of meeting him!
It is the ultimate gift he has fostered as a psychotherapist - to create a space with so much acceptance that I was able to meet myself without judgment, with acceptance for all that I am - and I am not only rainbows and butterflies. I am rage, I hold darkness and I am and can be violent!
He has helped me come to terms and be ok with these parts of myself, and also to choose how I show up in every moment in spite of how I see many hurt humans treating one another in this world.
Many of my sessions over 6 years of care with him have been remarkably joyful and celebratory, unlike my judgments of what therapy was in the past.
He has helped me change my relationship with alcohol, something I realize which does not serve me and has hurt and held me back for most of my adult life.
He has helped me change my relationship with myself, and not surprisingly - Marissa walked into my life after a significant chunk of that work was spoken free.
He has helped me soothe my relationship with Christianity. I see and more so, feel & experience the beauty within it again, past the often hypocritical and human interpretation of God.
(God for me, for a period of time, sounded like a bit of an asshole - “I love you unconditionally, but if you break these rules, I will hand you over to an evil fallen angel to be tortured for eternity”)
He has helped me trust men! I realize I never really did, as much as I trusted women, and now I have deep and amazing relationships with men on equal footing who I can equally say “I love you” or “you are showing up as an asshole”.
He has helped me see my father as a man, not only as a father who I saw as flawed (or more accurately, a reflection of the flaws I saw in myself). But one I see as remarkable and braver than I ever gave credit - a good man who is even greater than the hero I saw him as, as a child.
In a short 6 years I can truthfully say that I like and have grown to fully love who I am. This has changed everything, especially how people treat me.
I believe the world would be a completely different place in a very short period of time, if every human realised that therapy or a priest, a rabbi, a spiritual guide or at the very least a weirdo who allows us each to land in our own skin fully (without judgment), just listened with care and without trying to fix us.
My experience of therapy has not been about whinging about my mother and father, it's been about freeing myself from the bullshit of the stories I have created during life which I have absorbed without being aware.
And the more I delve into how the mind works, the more I realise just how our stories rule our lives as subconscious or hidden beliefs! We can play with the “law of attraction” all we like, “it” wont manifest if the underlying beliefs don’t change.
Therapy doesn't mean you are broken, in fact it's quite the opposite! I have learned to understand it actually means that you are willing to explore your humanity and see humanity for the creative and flawed expression it is - full of imperfect colorful, weird and wonderful humans making every decision possible! Good or bad is yet another belief thats worth interrogating!
John signs my invoices as “soul friend”. That's what it is… in truth.
I dare you ;-)
