Therapy: Can Therapy Allow Someone To Temporarily Fulfil Their Unmet Childhood Needs?

After having worked with a therapist for a number of weeks or months, someone could find that they start to feel better. Thanks to this, a few areas of their life could also start to improve.

For example, they might have found it hard to take action before but now it is a lot easier for them to take the first step. It could then be said that the work that they are doing is allowing them to become stronger.

The Focus

This could show that they had trouble feeling supported and lacked self-belief before. If so, before they started having therapy, this will have been something that they wanted to change.

They will then be able to look back on how they were before and see that they are making a lot of progress. When it comes to what takes place when they are having a therapy session, this could be a time when they are looking into what they believe and the thoughts that typically run through their head.

One Focus

In this case, what is going on up top, so to speak, will be the area of focus and transforming what happens there will the priority. This could mean that they are working with a cognitive behavioural therapist, for instance.

Along with the work that is done in this environment, they could also be encouraged to take certain steps in their day-to-day life. This will then be a way for them to integrate what they do in a session and to make even more progress.

The Next Step

After a while, they could get to the point where they no longer feel the need to be assisted in this way. They will feel radically different to how they felt before and they will have made a number of changes too, so this is to be expected.

The days and weeks could pass and their life could continue to go in the same direction, or, there could come a point, when they no longer feel as supported and a lot of doubt starts to creep in. If this is what takes place, they could begin to wonder what is going on, in addition to feeling deeply hopeless and helpless.

Confusion

It will be as if they had access to a power supply and now that the therapy has come to an end, this supply has gradually dried up. Naturally, as they feel so different, they are going to want to know what is going on.

What this can show is that a big part of what allowed them to feel different was that they were engaging in transference. So, without realising, it, they will have projected one or a number of people onto the therapist that they were working with.

A Powerful

In all likelihood, they unconsciously saw this person as their mother and/or father or another family member who was around during their early years. By doing this, they were able to feel how they would have felt around this person many, many years ago.

Or, perhaps to be more precise, how they wanted to feel when they were around this parent or family member. This may have been a stage of their life when certain needs were rarely if ever met.

Under The Radar

These unmet childhood needs won’t have simply disappeared; they will have ended up automatically being repressed by their brain. The pain that they would have experienced through being deprived will have also been repressed.

When they started to work with the therapist, this part of them, through seeing another authority figure as their parent or parents or someone else, will have believed that these needs were finally being met. This would have allowed them to feel supported and to believe in themselves, among other things.

A Short-Term Solution

Once they stopped working with this therapist, they would no longer have someone in their life who they unconsciously saw in this way and thus, the feelings that they were able to experience as a result of momentarily fulfilling their unmet childhood needs will have stopped being produced. Now that they don’t feel supported and experience doubt, they will be in touch with how they felt originally.

What this illustrates is that there was what one was aware of when they were having therapy and what they were not aware of; needs that they were consciously aware of and needs that were outside of their conscious awareness. This shows that they don’t begin and end with their conscious mind – this part of their consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg.

Awareness

Ultimately, transference is not bad; it is simply something that will allow someone to become aware of the wounds that they need to resolve. The key, of course, is for someone to become aware of what is going on.

With awareness, they will be able to do something about what is going on and move forward; without it, they will continue to unconsciously look towards a therapist, or another person to complete them. They will then be a dependent, as opposed to an interdependent, human being.