Therapy to distance ourselves from suffering: a proposal

In the first consultation, I usually visualize people who come to therapy as being crushed by a giant stone.

This stone is unique in each of the patients, but they all have in common the brutal weight, the impossibility of getting rid of it; sometimes the comic-book image of people being dragged by a snowball, falling down the side of the mountain, comes to mind.

And that's where therapy begins: begin to put distance between the person and their suffering...

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Mindfulness-Based Therapies: The Mindfulness Paradox

One of the axes that usually articulates therapy has to do with acceptance: accept that suffering, or anxiety, or sadness, or recurring thoughts are going to be part of our lives, and begin to consider them as travel companions. Only this makes things change. It is not resigning, it is not giving up, but it is admitting these phenomena as they are.

I remember a special case, that of someone we will call M. He looked at me strangely when I proposed to make friends with her depression, and later acknowledged that When he took this step and even "went for a walk with her", he realized that he stopped having so much power in his lifetime.

Also noteworthy is the case of J.A., who she became an expert at greeting his intrusive thoughts that had to do with potential misfortunes that lurked everywhere. She was able to practice kindness with them, she greeted them, thanked them for her visit and said goodbye to them cordially, and at that moment they stopped ruining her day.

Y this is the paradox of therapies based on acceptance and Mindfulness: the more I accept my difficulty, the less power it has in me. And vice versa: the more I try to get rid of my difficulty, the more it sticks to me and the more suffering it generates.

Let's think of M., a person overcome by her thoughts: she was perfectly aware of when her thoughts took over her, but she couldn't stop them, they “crushed” her. Attempts to distract herself, to cover them up with medication had been unsuccessful, she was really desperate. The first step consisted in taking a step back, in getting out of the pot of thoughts in which she was macerating and being able to begin to see thoughts for what they are: mental events, not reality. Thus he could begin to recognize the thoughts, to distance himself from them, to ignore them so much; she began to assume that "thoughts are not facts" and there she began a crucial liberation process in her life.

Or as happened to S., who lived in such a state of activation and hyperirritability and who was having problems in almost every area of ​​her life: in the family, at work, at bedtime, at eat... Introducing small pauses in his life in which he paid attention to the body, emotions or breathing made those moments become handles from which to begin a work of recovery of moments of calm, small but increasingly frequent.

Suffering also occurs on a physical level. I remember N. whose stomach lit up every time he had any problem with your partner, and just paying attention to physical sensations and allowing your stomach to express itself caused this sensation to loosen and he could more easily approach his sensations bodily. As I paid attention to the body, the body was looser, he felt more and more in balance.