I am dealing with things in a more rational way and haven’t felt need to make a drama of stuff since the session. Things are busy but I’m managing to handle it 🙂.
It feels natural, as if I had always been this way.
I helped a client over just a few sessions come to terms with and recover from an abusive childhood. She reported feeling so much lighter and happier following our work, and continued to come and see me when new difficulties arose in her life.
On one occasion she started exploring how fed up she felt of over-dramatising everything in her life. As we worked it emerged that the issue was linked to her family circumstances meaning she missed out on being a ‘normal’ two-year-old, testing boundaries and having tantrums with parents providing loving limits. This missing piece of her development had impacted her life years later, finding she was struggling, as she put it, to stop the feeling of constant catastrophes happening in her life.
Unlike more conventional therapies where clients might gain insight into what has been missing in their past, in Pesso Boyden we work to create an ‘antidote’ so the client can experience reversing what happened, or completing the missing part. Exploring this alternative, ‘ideal possibility’, my client started to imagine what her life might have been like if she had had her parents allowing her two-year-old anger and distress: her body started to relax, her breathing deepened, and her body started to wire in this new ‘memory’. The client knew that this was only happening in the hypothetical past, but on an emotional level, using the Pesso techniques, her brain was able to start to ‘re-wire’ this life-affirming possibility. She felt it to be true, as on a cellular level it met and satisfied her inner need to satisfy and fulfil this area in her life. As a result, she experienced a huge sense of freedom and relief. She now felt more able to deal calmly with the challenging moments in her daily life which had previously overwhelmed her.
After the session she reported that she forgotten what we did and needed to be reminded.