What is talked about in a therapy session?

It is installed in the collective imagination what happens in therapy sessions. On the one hand, there is the idea that it is about going to touch on painful issues from the past about which we cannot do anything about it, since what happened cannot be changed. On the other hand, It is seen as a space in which it is necessary to touch those points of our history in order to transform them and transform ourselves..

The truth is that paradoxical as it may seem, both perceptions are correct. It is impossible to change any event in the past itself, so it would give the idea of ​​a certain frustration when exposing those feelings and facts that, after all, cannot be modified; what happens is that those repressed memories determine our current state of mind without us being able to hear about it.

• Related article: "What to expect and what not to expect from psychological therapy"

What is the process of self-exploration in therapy?

The search in therapy consists of building our story WITH respect to what happened to us or what we did at a certain moment, to

being able to explain to ourselves what happened and what we would have wanted to happen. With this, we try to see at what points in our lives there were moments of great emotional impact, moments that can only be remembered. in the therapy itself, and to be able to achieve a change in our subjective position not only with respect to the past, but also to current situations, daily, in which we see that we repeat patterns of behavior that make us distress or inhibit our actions that we may want do.

That is to say, that here the facts of our history are being considered as nodal points where the later ones take shape. emotional reactions to the future situations that they have to live. Although, as we are holding, it is always from the present that it is possible to speak of the past that returns each time under new repetitions, where life makes us find those moments where we see that “the same thing happens again”.

Therefore, it is from those situations that affect us now that it is possible to build their causes, giving a spiral movement where by working on the present the past is elaborated and vice versa. Freud he compared the work of psychoanalysis like a pendulum on a clock that goes from the past to the present and from the present to the past in a constant manner.

Examining the meaning of our past

Returning to one of the many paths that are built in psychoanalytic therapy, let us remember that it is necessary to resignify what happens to us and although according to certain situations, reflections... it is possible to become aware on our own of something that until now we could not see, it should be said that the framework of therapy is designed to give rise to that emergence of new thoughts that make us see the situation from another manner.

And if there is something characteristic that these psychic formations present, such as memories, for example, it is that several meanings are hidden behind them and not just one. Again with Freud, these are the so-called "disguising memories", since behind them there are a variety of affects that are nucleated in it in order to keep hidden certain sensations that for the moment are not allowed to come to light.

The memory works as a mask for the feelings behind it. So, the idea of ​​resignifying consists of experiencing that things are not in themselves, they do not have a single meaning when it comes to the emotional world. Upon understanding it, the situation is discovered in a new way, it no longer presents itself with the emotional weight it had until then, since there is a new variety of thoughts that make their way by overcoming that affective resistance and the charge that was gathered in a single thought is released towards a new way of perceiving the reality.

Of course these processes are not immediate, consists of certain moments of questioning, reflection and construction in which oneself builds with what he elaborates on himself and perhaps does not get an answer from the discomfort in a short time, because as we said, that cloudy and confusing discomfort covers up various realities, but by giving them another meaning than the original one, the process itself becomes calming until fundamental points of the construction are touched where it is no longer necessary to return there except to learn from oneself and continue growing as a human being, with everything that this entails.