Where you find yourself right now – your circumstances, your personality, your thoughts and beliefs, your feelings and emotions, your patterns of relating to yourself and others… all of it – makes perfect sense.
There is a perfect logic to who you are. It is an indisputable logic. And the same is true for every person on the planet (including your partner), which is kind of weird, because they might believe things that seem opposite to what you believe.
The point is, you don’t have to argue for who you are, good parts (wanted, by you) or bad parts (unwanted, by you). And you don’t have to argue with others about who they are.
When a new client or client couple begins working with me, they often come with an initial expectation that they need to make a case, sometimes an elaborate case, for why they are where they are: why they believe what they believe, why they’re stuck where they’re stuck, and especially why they feel how they feel. They expect that it is necessary for them to create or understand elaborate webs of connection between their past experience and their present experience, and they sometimes seem to expect that I will be judging them or rating their proficiency, or that my job is to help them vivify this web of connection between past and present experiences.
I actually approach each new client, and indeed each new conversation, with the assumption that there are excellent reasons for feeling the way you feel. There’s a perfect logic to it. We actually need to spend virtually no time down that path.
What I want to know is not how do you feel and how did you come to feel this way, but rather, how do you WANT to feel, and how do we move you in that direction now. So rather than building evidence to support a case that is a foregone conclusion I encourage you to jump as quickly as possible to the part where you get clear about what you want. Your entire experience is all logical, all valid, all understandable… what now?
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