To the woman who posted that she thought she was a failure because her therapist is frustrated she can't do the "seemingly innocuous thing that most people have no trouble doing, but that represents lots of trauma to her."
It involved unpacking boxes, she said. "Can't I even unpack one box?"
Girl, there’s nothing wrong with you!
I work with women just like this all the time who were “bad” at therapy, who didn’t get anywhere in their counseling, who have nothing to show for all their years of working on themselves!
There’s nothing wrong with you, there's nothing wrong with your counselor, it’s just we all learn and grow and have our shifts in different ways.
Just like so many of us concluded that we were “bad” at math.
It’s not that there’s some inherent math deficiency in us; it’s that we now know that we don’t all learn the same way! They didn't know that back then, when it was an old, intimidating male teacher repeating the same lesson at our desks that he’d just said up at the board - but this time ending with the ominous question, "You can see that now, right?"
Except that we didn’t.
We blamed it on ourselves or our lack of mathematical ability or whatever else we could find, but not on the system and not on the teacher and not on the way he or a system above him had arbitrarily decided was the way we should learn.
It’s precisely this approach that holds us back and keeps us buying into the belief that once again, it’s back to something lacking in us.
So maybe you don’t learn the way someone else thinks you should learn in the same way that works for everyone else they’ve ever worked with, because you’re your own person.
Maybe there’s some nuance there that triggers you in a subconscious way and keeps you from seeing what you might otherwise have seen with someone else or with a different approach.
It’s not a reflection on them or you, but simply a fact that some of us learn better under different circumstances with different people.
It’s not personal either way!
Find your people, find your places, find your ways of going about your life that resonate with you and fill your cup and make you feel genuinely good about yourself in ways that might not be explainable logically or practically, but solely because they resonate with you!
You don’t have to explain yourself, you don’t have to defend yourself, you simply have to own that you have a right and a choice to look at whether what you’ve been doing is still working for you.
When you outgrow a person or an idea that previously held so much hope and promise for you, it’s okay to recognize that and do something different.
The people who matter will understand this; the ones who can’t don’t matter.
If there’s nothing wrong with you, if that script is only past programming that no longer can threaten you, the world is truly your oyster, Beautiful.
Love,
Jane
P.S. If you're this woman - or if you know who she is - please pass this along! And I'd love to hear from YOU in the comments if any part of this resonated with you today!
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