When something goes wrong, you feel like you failed. Maybe you lose your job, or you go through a traumatic breakup, and all of a sudden, life can seem daunting. It’s hard to see the good in life when something out of your control occurs. Imagine someone close to you dies and you are grieving. Getting past your pain is hard. Sure, you are entitled to feel deep sadness, but after a while, that grief can grow into depression, making it hard to function. That’s when you need to seek professional help. One of the many forms of treatment that can work when you’re stuck in a rut is Solution Focused Therapy.
What is Solution Focused Therapy?
Rather than focusing on the past, Solution Focused Therapy (or Solution Based Therapy) centers around what’s happening right here, right now. As much as you want to, you cannot change what happened in the past, but you can work towards a better future and a better way of thinking about what happened in the past. When you see a therapist that practices Solution Focused Therapy, your treatment plan revolves around problem-solving your immediate dilemmas, rather than ruminating on what happened in your past. Let’s go back to the previous example: perhaps someone close to you passes away. You can’t let go of your pain. You’re having trouble getting up in the morning, going to work, functioning at work, and you’re terrified that you’re going to lose your job. Your therapist could help you learn skills to manage your depression, refocus on your work while you are there, and support you in getting back to a generally stable place so you can function outside of work as well.
“I Can’t Let Go.”
As much as you want to let go of your past, it can be incredibly painful – and that’s understandable. You might be reading this and thinking, “But it was so painful,” or, “I can’t let go of what happened to me.” Let’s be clear: your pain and your life experiences – including the traumatic events you’ve endured – all matter. You are entitled to your feelings, and they are real. However, you and your trauma are not the same. You have a unique identity, a core self, and the traumatic events that you’ve faced don’t define you. You’re allowed to feel all of your feelings associated with past events, and it’s crucial to feel those emotions. However, it’s not healthy to stay in a place of pain longer than you need to. How do you do this? Process your feelings as you feel them.
Feel Your Feelings
Human beings fight feeling pain because it’s instinctual to do this. Nobody wants to hurt physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. However, pain is an inevitable part of the human experience. It’s unfortunate that we have to suffer, but there are ways to cope with these intense feelings. How do you deal with pain? The answer is simple: feel it. When you feel pain of any kind, your instinct is going to be to fight it. You’ll probably seek a way to hide or avoid these feelings. That’s not the way to get past your pain. The best way to handle painful emotions is to face them head-on. Imagine you break up with a long-term partner of 10 years. Here’s a situation where the wound is fresh, and you’re in a tremendous amount of emotional duress. The last thing you’re going to want to do is to feel these new, intense feelings, but you need to do this in order to understand and process what is going on more fully. When you experience pain, you remember what you’ve lost, let yourself cry, scream, punch pillows, or call someone you trust to talk about how you feel. Get those feelings out of you so that you’re not repressing them. When you ignore your feelings, they will come back stronger and hurt you more. It’s best to feel them as they happen rather than running from them.
Work Towards a Solution
Working with a skilled mental health professional is an invaluable tool in helping you feel better. Rather than focusing on what you should have said or done, you can talk to a Solution Based Therapist about what you want to do, and they can guide you on the path to achieve this goal. Whether you work with a local therapist or find an online counselor trained in Solution Based Therapy, you have the right to obtain a state of balance in your life. Consider working with a therapist or counselor and help yourself find the right solutions to problems that you may be dealing with in a different way.
This is a featured post by site sponsor Better Help.
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