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Beyond Therapy: End your Healing Journey and Begin Thriving

A fun photo of my partner and collaborator in thriving, Vanessa, on a recent hike.
Listen to me read this in its entirety here (26 minutes), or listen to me read an edited version here (12 minutes).
The end of therapy stigma

“Have you been single lately? Online dating has become a strange kind of matchmaking based on trauma and disorder compatibility.”

This from a new female acquaintance who finally gave up on finding a mate through shared therapy stories and resorted to the old-fashioned approach of seeking shared interests beyond wound collecting.

I’m happy to say she’s now dating quite a nice fellow who enjoys walks on the beach and sharing laughter more than confessing his self-doubt and itemizing the ways he feels anxious.

Apparently it’s not much different for men.

My male friend has numerous stories of women’s dating profiles, and actual conversations, first conversations mind you, that are focused entirely upon “the work” they have done on themselves, plus a handy checklist of requirements for any potential partner: must tend to your inner child, be integrating your shadow, meet with a conscious men’s group, know your attachment wound and style and be actively working on it, journal daily, do breath work, know your personality type and astrological sign (bonus points if you know your full chart), commit to daily intimacy practices, heal your mother wound, use psychedelics in a therapeutic setting at least twice a year, and be committed to a lifelong healing journey.

And this is just the world of dating.

Before I cancelled my social media accounts last year, I was subjected to a constant stream of ads for therapy apps making broad and sometimes bizarre claims about connections between trauma, ADHD, procrastination, relationship conflict, anxiety, and, of course, belly fat.

Most of them included some kind of questionnaire to determine your “trauma type”. They seemed a lot like those sensationalized quizzes that used to be in magazines at the checkout line, trying to hook you with questions like “What kind of lover were you in a past life?” or “What does your pet really think of you?”

Meanwhile, hardcore rappers are referencing therapy in their songs. TV and movie producers are scrambling to portray trauma-informed characters, and school-age kids are openly speculating with each other about what kind of diagnosis might be on their horizon.

All of this points to one conclusion. Any social stigma attached to therapy has been absolutely, completely, thoroughly erased. When the baddest-assed rapper on the block is spitting therapy verses, we can be sure the stigma is gone.

The opposite effect has actually been achieved, and quite quickly. Not only is there no shame in therapy anymore (a good thing, obviously) there is now status and even virtue in it, and this has created a monster.

The spread of therapy culture

To understand what I am about to say, you must understand that therapy has spilled into something much, much bigger than something you do for one hour each week with your therapist.

Therapy has become a mindset, and as this mindset has spread among individuals, it has morphed into a bona fide culture.

Therapy culture comes with its own rituals and rites, its own language, rules, and hierarchies. Importantly, in therapy culture it is taboo to thrive too much, or for too long. Brief forays into ecstasy are permitted, but a predictable, cyclical fall must follow.

The bonds made between people in therapy culture are based on wounding and struggle, and on validating one another’s wounds and struggles, even seeing them as “sacred”.

Gaining full membership in therapy culture hinges upon your ability to express a full range of emotional upheaval and chaos; this is viewed as being authentic and vulnerable, two of the most cherished qualities in this social arena.

I have been at workshops and retreats where participants are encouraged to “break themselves open”, allowing their grief, their doubt, their disappointment, their rage to spill forth and be witnessed.

Some people at these retreats, I discovered, have been coming and doing these rituals of personal catharsis and collective bonding for twenty or thirty years or more, with no observable improvement other than perhaps in performative flair.

It is not uncommon to hear it proclaimed that this work – this healing work, this trauma work, this integration work, grief work, shadow work… there are many names for “the work” – is never over, is never done, and is not only endless for those living today, but has been passed along and will continue to be passed along from generation to generation.

I am not making this up. This a strongly felt and clearly articulated belief in the culture.

At these same workshops and retreats, which perfectly reflect the therapy culture I am talking about, anyone who does not participate enthusiastically in the rites and rituals of emotional purging, or who offers or embodies something different, like an easy-going joy or optimism for example, is visibly ignored, condemned or marginalized by the group and labelled as armored or shut-down or avoidant, or accused of spiritual by-passing or denial or being disconnected from their feelings. Those who suffer most loudly and convincingly are given the most attention and receive the highest status.

These intentionally designed immersive experiences provide a rather extreme example of the therapy mindset and therapy culture, but we also find the same basic intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, perspectives, values, and practices in everyday life in chatrooms, support groups, coffee shops, workplaces, schools, politics, and, apparently, dating sites.

Too much of a good thing

How did we get here? How did a fascination with struggle and unwellness capture the hearts and minds of so many, so fast?

I’ll offer a simple answer: too much of a good thing, taken too far.

Doing therapy, for many people, is the introduction to a rich inner world of feeling. Formerly suppressed, repressed, denied, minimized, or ignored emotions are brought out of the “shadow” and into awareness. With a shock equal parts ecstasy and agony, comes the revelation: “I can feel!”

For some, this is only the beginning. A person comes to therapy with an issue or a problem, and like Jacques Cousteau they become enchanted by a fascinating colorful world, previously hidden but always there beneath the surface.

The world of feeling is visceral, vast and varied. Once it is uncovered, there is a desire to find others who are also exploring it. Stories are shared, bonds are made, communities built, and out of this, a culture is born.

Because therapy is the context from which the inner world of feeling has been discovered, and because problems and “issues” are the primary material of therapy, the inner world of emotion becomes associated with struggle.

To maintain the depth of inner experience and collective bonding that is desired, ever more traumas, doubts, conflicts and turmoil must be forever excavated and expressed.

Today’s therapy culture has created for itself an infinite trauma-verse, where members have instant access to a never-ending stream of potential triggers and transformations.

All of this can bring great satisfaction, at least for a time. The intensity and exhilaration of touching raw emotional nerves, the sense of acceptance as painful experiences are validated by others; this is powerful stuff and it has become many people’s idea of intimacy.

Therapy culture provides, like any culture does, a sense of purpose, of identity, of coherence and belonging. It’s no wonder that people get a taste of that and want more.

Feeling good about feeling bad

But ultimately therapy culture can only help you feel good about feeling bad. It gives you company and validation in your grievance and your grief, but therapy culture cannot deal in straight up joy, because it is fundamentally mired in dilemma and ambivalence, reflecting the origins of modern psychotherapy.

Freud and Jung were both committed to a fascination with the conflicting, often sado-masochistic, instincts and desires of human beings, and, at least in Jung’s case, to using these “opposing forces” to facilitate some kind of “alchemy” or growth for the individual and the collective.

Today’s therapy culture has taken this premise to the extreme, and embellished it with all sorts of newer trauma and attachment models. Intersectional theory, social justice, climate grief and eco-anxiety are the latest additions. Endless dilemmas, wounds, and wrong-doings are conjured in order to provide some coherent sense of connection, understanding, poignancy, and meaning.

No end to the healing, no bottom to the wound

It’s true that a healing journey can be a lifelong, never-ending endeavour because there is no end, no bottom to the doubt and struggle, the dilemma and ambivalence, the painful memories and imagining that you might repeatedly choose to activate in yourself.

There is no resolution if you do not actually seek resolution, or believe that resolution is possible, or for that matter, that resolution is desirable. After all, if you were actually healed, once and for all, what would you talk about?

You can always find another pain-point, another dissatisfaction, another conflict or unwanted experience. The trauma-verse is indeed infinite and endless, and while any actual therapist worth their salt seeks to help their clients find some kind of resolution or relief, therapy culture has run amok with an unchecked appetite for emotional difficulty and problematizing.

Adventures beyond the trauma-verse

But all of this is optional.

Trauma and wounding do not offer a full and accurate picture of the world or of human history and life. It’s been said that we do not see the world as it is, but as we are. A vision of a wounded world in need of healing is not a vision of the world itself, it’s a vision of the perceiver, and perception is, mercifully, subject to change and growth.

I worked as a therapist for over ten years, and one day I made an incredible discovery with one of my clients, a discovery that sent both of us on a new trajectory.

We had been working on an endless litany of problems and issues: family conflicts, procrastination, uncertainty about where to live, interpersonal frictions and misunderstandings… pretty common stuff, all framed within the search for some hidden causality lurking in the shadows, needing to be discovered and sufficiently understood, integrated, processed, or healed.

Our approach was firmly rooted in a therapy mindset, which is appropriate after all when you’re doing therapy!

And then I got a bolt of clarity.

In a single moment I knew: there was nothing wrong with this person. They were just figuring out what they wanted next, and at some level they believed they should already know the answer, so they were making it hard on themselves.

There was no mystery to solve from their childhood or psyche that would unlock some special understanding or integration or healing. And no amount of emotional processing or inquiry, no matter how skillful or compassionate, was ever going to deliver real satisfaction because it would not touch the deeper desire emerging, which was simply to feel good unconditionally.

I could see in a flash that if this person just let themselves be, and stopped poking at sore spots, things would get clearer, life would get easier and more enjoyable, and the next step would always reveal itself in good time.

Of course, I might be out of a job if I took this insight too far, but what the hell, I would find something else to do (and I actually did).

I acted on my intuition and started asking new questions:

Are you ready to give up on finding the source of your unhappiness? Will you entertain the idea that there is nothing wrong with you?

And this one:

What if you just trusted your desire to feel good and let that guide you in each and every moment?

Boom. That was it. I could feel the shift.

My client had done hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of therapy with a variety of therapists. She was fully immersed in therapy culture, doing workshops on trauma, inner child work, authentic communication, grief, and every kind of popular method and model you can imagine. In some ways she knew my field better than I did!

And yet all that knowledge, all that work, all that processing and learning, while providing some good and satisfying experiences, did not ultimately hit the mark because it all unwittingly reinforced the message “There’s something wrong with me.”

When this person decided to accept my invitation and trust their desire to feel good and let that desire guide them, everything changed, and far from our work together being over, we both realized that a new chapter had begun. Years later, she still does sessions with me.

Beyond therapy and into thriving

That day both my client and I evolved beyond therapy and into thriving.

That was in 2021, and I have made enormous discoveries and refinements to my methods and my understanding on a daily basis ever since. In short, I no longer help people heal, I help them thrive.

And it turns out that both are never-ending journeys. One is just a lot more fun than the other.

As I began re-imagining my work and re-aligning myself to reflect these leading edge discoveries, I quickly came to a powerful realization: you can’t be focused upon healing and upon thriving at the same time. You have to choose. Each comes with its own unique mindset, and they are distinct and exclusive from one another.

Three stages of personal growth

Personal growth follows a basic three step trajectory. It’s worth explaining because it’s worth understanding. See if you can identify where you are in these three stages:

First, there’s emotional suppression.

At this stage you rely mostly on thinking and doing to sustain you. Feelings are not very welcome or useful to you, and they might even seem like a nuisance. Remember Tony Soprano from the HBO series?

Then there’s emotional expression.

At this stage, you’ve discovered your feelings and you embrace them. You’re always exploring new depths of feeling, and you don’t judge any feelings to be better or worse than any other feelings. All feelings are welcome. Therapy and therapy culture are products and promoters of this stage.

The third stage is emotional discretion.

At this stage you are far beyond the emotional suppression or repression of stage one. You are comfortable with the full range of emotional expression found at stage two. But now you have also developed preferences about which feelings you want to experience, and you have discovered that you have creative power in determining your own emotional experience.

Emotional suppression, emotional expression, emotional discretion: three stages of personal development, all legitimate, and each building upon the former.

The third stage, emotional discretion, represents the leading edge of personal growth and collective consciousness today.

While many people are just now blossoming into full emotional expression and embracing their full range of feelings, a few are even further along the path of emotional mastery, becoming sharply focused and discerning about what kind of emotional life they want to be creating for themselves.

[I explain these three stages of emotional development in more detail in my R3 Relationship Masterclass.]

Moving into thriving

The client I was talking about had reached the limits of the emotional expression stage, and frankly so had I. We’d outgrown it, squeezed every last bit of satisfaction out of it. Together we chose to move forward, and in our move forward we discovered emotional discretion. We both had clarity about how we wanted to feel, and we were ready to trust this clarity and begin self-aligning with it.

In truth, I was a bit farther along this path than she was, and so I was able to offer some guidance and mentorship from a place of experience, but it’s also true that my most potent discoveries and developments come from my conversations with clients, and I’m always working with clients right at my own personal leading edge because this is where liveliness and exhilaration are found.

[You can listen to this client describe her experience of working with me in her own words on my website here.]

The move from a therapy mindset to a thriving mindset is a developmental move from the emotional expression stage to the emotional discretion stage. It marks the discovery of preference and of choice.

Personal growth is always characterized by an increase in choice, because growth means expansion, and part of what is expanding is perspective. An expanded perspective results in greater choice. This is self-empowerment defined, and it is the beginning of thriving.

To thrive means to fully befriend your desire to feel good, and to let this desire guide you in each moment. Consider the implications: if you were to really do this, you would have to change how you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself, and, of course, how you behave in the world and create your life.

None of this happens overnight, but there is a noticeable tipping point, a single moment when you decide: “I want to feel good. I deserve to feel good. I am capable of creating a life experience that feels good.”

If this sounds selfish, you’re right. Thriving is selfish in the best possible way. You can only choose thriving for yourself, not for anyone else. You can invite and encourage others to thrive, as I am doing here with you, but you actually have no real power in this regard. Also, your refusal or reluctance to thrive helps no one, ever.

If you choose thriving it’s because you decide that feeling good matters to you, and that it matters more than all the obstacles to thriving that you’ve inadvertently placed in your way along the course of your life.

When you stick with your desire to feel good, and you let it guide you in each moment, you discover something surprising: everything that you want is for the same reason. You want it because you believe it will make you feel good. You want this and you want that, and all of it in the hopes of an emotional reward. This is a wonderful and illuminating discovery, and it will take you on a very satisfying journey if you let it.

Describing the details of this would be too much for this short introduction, and besides, they’re for you to discover for yourself first-hand.

I’m sharing all of this with you because I want to invite you to begin thriving. I’ve been on my own journey of thriving and have been leading others on it for a few years, and I can you tell you, it’s a magnificent adventure.

Wherever you seek your satisfaction is absolutely fine. It’s actually finding it that matters most. If you’re finding your bliss in the ouroboros of the wound and its healing, then by all means continue with all my blessings and encouragement.

If, one day, this gives way to a new desire that matches my description of thriving, you have in your hands, in my words here, a bridge, and I’m so happy to be able to provide it.

Thriving starts within (get your vibe right)

Thriving is often seen as a physical state, and it is to some degree, but it starts as an inner state, as thought and feeling, and at subtler levels as energy and vibration. That’s where you cultivate the ground of thriving, not in outward behaviors or activities. Those outward expressions flow naturally and effortlessly once the inner environment is stable.

Focus on your thoughts and feelings, bringing them into alignment with your desire to feel good. Get your vibe right.

If you simply stop activating those old patterns of thought and feeling that lead you into doubt, they will begin to fade.

The therapy mindset encourages you to get to the bottom of those patterns. The thriving mindset says there is no bottom; leave them alone and focus on your natural desire to feel good.

If you let your desire to feel good guide you – not your trauma or pain or discontent – you will move quickly into the leading edge of your growth. You’ll know when you make that shift. It’s unmistakable because it feels so good.

The evolution from a therapy mindset to a thriving mindset is often made first in solitude, but it need not feel lonely.

This is a time to connect with your essential self more deeply than ever before. Know this: your essence is not emotional turmoil, it is emotional clarity and discernment.

Make a practice of actively appreciating and enjoying your emotional clarity and discernment. This can be as simple as speaking kindly to yourself: “I love feeling my clarity about wanting to feel good. I enjoy feeling good for no reason at all. I love knowing that I deserve to feel good, and that my capacity for joy grows as I grow.”

This is a solo journey because you cannot bring anyone who is not ready, and if you have been firmly embedded in the therapy mindset and culture, most of your friends probably are as well.

Don’t try to convince anyone else to thrive. Do it just for you, regardless of whatever the people around you are doing. Ignore others if it helps you focus; focus is crucial.

Embrace your desire to feel good. Accept the fact that you deserve to feel good. Show yourself that you are capable of creating a life experience that feels good, first by cultivating better-feeling patterns of thought and feeling, and then by allowing this to naturally translate into the kind of self-supporting, self-respecting, and self-loving behaviour that is an expression of thriving.

Once better-feeling patterns of thought and feeling are stable in you, you become a living expression of them. Your behaviour naturally reflects what you have cultivated within, and you will start to bring it forth in others without effort or sacrifice.

This is an organic process. Trust it. Don’t try to force it or rush it.

Let it be easy, let it be fun

All of this is the tiniest snapshot of an idea so big I could fill many books. Please use whatever is resonant and useful, and put anything else aside, especially if it activates resistance in you. Make it easy for yourself. Let it be fun.

The therapy mindset is about hard work and struggle. By contrast, thriving is all about the natural ease that comes with recognizing and embracing who you really are and what you desire most.

If you like what I’m sharing with you here, and if you know someone else who might benefit from reading these words, please give them the gift of sharing this with them.

And of course I provide one-on-one coaching, mentoring, and consulting on this topic in a style unlike anyone else, and I serve clients worldwide.

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber

Interested in coaching to help you complete your healing journey and start thriving? Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. Please include your country of residence. Distance sessions worldwide. Learn more: www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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What is Self-Alignment and Why Does it Matter?

Two Kinds of Self-Alignment

In my work, self-alignment plays a central role and means something specific. When I talk about self-alignment, I am speaking primarily of two things:

1. Aligning Desire with Positive Emotion

The first kind of self-alignment that I teach is the alignment between your desire and how you feel about your desire.

Desire simply means “what I want”, and the clarity that matters most throughout all of life is always clarity about what you want. The details of this change, and so you must keep current by aligning yourself emotionally with whatever it is that you want now.

Desire is a cornerstone of human experience and is the primary evolutionary force shaping our world, so it’s worth understanding.

Here’s the simplest way to put it:

When you want something and you feel good (eager, expectant, deserving, clear, easeful, certain, optimistic, hopeful, peaceful) about wanting it, you are in self-alignment. Your emotion is aligned with your desire.

When you want something and feel bad (uncertain, doubtful, undeserving, guilty, ashamed, confused) about it, you are out of self-alignment. Your emotion is misaligned with your desire.

When you know what you want, you feel clarity. When it feels good to know what you want, you are in alignment. This describes every powerful vision of every leader who has ever lived.

You will never extinguish your desire, and you will never be finished wanting more, and so you are wise to get into a good-feeling relationship with this whole business.

2. Aligning Your Three Operating Systems

Human beings have three modes of engaging themselves and the world. I call them the three operating systems:

  • your cognitive self (thinking)
  • your emotional self (feeling)
  • your sensational (somatic) self.

Each of these three operating systems is important, and each has its own language and function. When all three are well understood, well maintained, and well aligned, a person can operate at full capacity with maximum effectiveness and well-being.

Most people, however, are accustomed to relying primarily on just one of these three operating systems or modes, occasionally engaging a second if absolutely necessary, and ignoring the third altogether.

The nature of these three operating systems is that no single one can be used at full potential unless all three are finely tuned and harmonized.

The possibility exists to master all three, and to learn to move comfortably and nimbly between them, using each one intentionally and to maximum benefit, depending upon context and circumstance.

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber

Interested in coaching to support your clarity and self-alignment?
Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. Please include your country of residence. Distance sessions worldwide.
Learn more: www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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People who are consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with themselves have satisfying and successful relationships.

People who are consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with themselves have satisfying and successful relationships.

It’s a simple equation, and it works the other way too: People who are not consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with themselves have troubled relationships.

This has been one of my key takeaways from a decade-long career as a couples therapist and marriage counsellor.

There is no stronger correlate to determine the quality of a relationship, and so there is no better intervention to improve a relationship than being consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with yourself.

Your reasons for being kind and gentle with yourself, or your reasons for being otherwise, do not matter whatsoever.

People who have had terrible childhoods can learn to be consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with themselves.

People who have experienced trauma can learn to be consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with themselves.

People who are avoidantly attached or anxiously attached can learn to be consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with themselves.

You can have a satisfying and successful relationship without a lot of hard work if you are simply willing to become consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with yourself.

You don’t need to heal your attachment wounds, integrate your shadow, understand your personality type, be a better communicator, or try to negotiate agreements with your partner in order to make yourself ready for a satisfying and successful relationship.

If you will become consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with yourself, you will become ready for the relationship you want.

If it sounds basic, it is. If it sounds simple, it is. But there is one small catch, two actually…

First, you’re probably not nearly as consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with yourself as you believe. It will take a high degree of sensitivity and honesty to recognize the vast room for improvement that almost certainly exists.

Second, the improved relationship that you make yourself ready for through this approach might not be with your current partner. It might be, but it might not be. That’s up to them, not you. When you reach a certain level of being consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with yourself, there will be a tipping point. Either your partner will be inspired by the change in you and will follow suit for themselves, and you will live happily ever after, or you will make yourself a match for a relationship that your partner is not a match for, and it will become clear that the relationship is no longer a good fit.

I’ve understood for a long time that personal growth, not partner negotiation, is the key to satisfying and successful relationships. This understanding sets me apart from most others in my field. The part of this that is becoming so clear now, the discovery that I love so much, is that personal growth is first and foremost a matter of being consistently, enthusiastically, and unconditionally kind and gentle with yourself. It isn’t work. It’s ease.

My R3 Relationship Masterclass is a three-hour deep dive into this fascinating, liberating, and enlightening topic. You are unlikely to hear these perspectives described like this anywhere else. Listen to a free sample here.

Distance sessions worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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Beyond Healing is Desire (“Do you want to do this the hard way or the easy way?”)

We can do this the hard way or the easy way

I remember, a number of years ago, spontaneously telling a new client “We can do this the hard way or the easy way.” I meant it most earnestly and graciously, and they heard it as a genuine invitation and choice.

The hard way, I explained, would be to trace your personal history in order to create a cohesive narrative that explains why you are having the kind of life experience that you are having. We would work to unearth memories and suppressed emotions, bringing whatever buried material we could find to the surface, at each step validating the unconscious choices you made in order to secure some physical or emotional need. All of this would hopefully bring a sense of integration and satisfaction, and would pave the way for greater choice in moving forward with your life and relationship.

Or, I said, we could do it the easy way. The easy way would be to begin from the premise that every twist and turn of your life has been purposeful and legitimate, and has brought you to this moment, and in this moment there is only one pertinent question: What do you want next?

An awareness of choice

Therapy, I believe, must always hold personal choice and freedom as the ultimate goal. We do therapy in many ways, for many particular reasons, but the overarching reason is to bring choice where there was not choice; more accurately, to bring an awareness of choice where there was not an awareness of choice.

It’s critically important to keep this vision, or else the therapeutic process can veer into the weeds, becoming an endless churning of past events, emotional murkiness, sociological phenomena, and the kinds of dilemma that psychology has been fascinated with for as long as it has existed.

I like to be clear about this from the onset with any new client, and I do not assume that prolonged difficulty or hard work is necessary to illuminate personal choice.

Much of the value of therapy is found within the fabric of the relationship between client and therapist. Much emphasis has been placed upon the trust bond, and the safety this creates. I use this trust to quickly model the choice that I want my clients to experience for themselves, from within, regardless of outer conditions, including other people.

Some people, many people, are almost ready to move into a more expansive experience of personal choice and freedom, but they come to therapy with an expectation that they will have to do a lot of hard work first. I do what I can to dispel this myth, and I begin by modeling the fundamental point that I am making here: I present a choice.

How do you want to do this? Are you seeking the satisfaction of excavating the past, or of creating your future? Either is fine. You choose. But each has a different energetic signature, and you can’t embody both equally at once.

Beyond healing is desire

To heal means to “make whole”. I know that you are already whole. I see your wholeness so clearly. Would you like to skip to the next step?

Beyond healing is desire. We can go right to the part where we talk about what you want. This is where the fun begins. None of the unwanted experiences from the past need any more attention beyond what you choose to give them. All of the unwanted experiences from the past have served to sharpen your clarity about what you want for yourself now. Are you ready to move into that place?

If you accept your unconditional wholeness, then “healing” becomes irrelevant, a thing of the past. It is desire that defines your present, and your future. What kind of experience do you want to create for yourself now, as you move forward? That is the question that any therapy should be leading to, and many people who seek therapy are ready to get into that question very quickly, if given the opportunity.

The question of desire – What do you want now? What kind of life experience do you want to be creating for yourself moving forward? – leads into a joyful process of discovery, if you allow it.

Discovering your relationship to desire (to wanting… desire and wanting are synonymous) is incredibly illuminating and empowering. It might be distressing at first, to see how cut off from your own desires you have been, but this distress need not lead down the old path of lament. You can learn to pivot quickly. Rather than attending to regret or sadness or shame, you can decide to move in the direction of wanted experience.

The client I mentioned at the beginning of this writing made their choice quickly and clearly. They wanted the easy way, and we have been having a wonderful time of discovery together ever since. We sometimes reflect upon that early choice-point, upon the question I put to them, and upon the clarity of their answer. We both find great satisfaction in this story and we occasionally tell it to each other in our sessions today, appreciating the shared knowledge of having laid a path in that moment that we continue to enjoy today.

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber

Distance sessions worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. Learn more: www.JusticeSchanfarber.com