im
recovering from drink problem 4yrs sober in 12 step prog with psychodynmic
counselling 2 yrs for depression would they interfere with recovery side
by side. ive become very angry pushing people who help me is this part of
therapy I feel worse than ever but therapist just replies with ~the answers
i need lie inside me~ what does she mean by that ? im desperate to
know
In the initial stage of recovery from alcoholism, some
form of social support—such as a 12-Step program—is critical. Through
group support and pressure you have to learn the
cognitive-behavioral
skills necessary to resist the temptation to drink. During all of this, it
really isn’t important to understand the deep
unconscious reasons
why you drink. All that matters is that you don’t
drink.
After you have
become established in recovery, then you can start
psychodynamic
psychotherapy to get to the cause of—and heal—the emotional
wounds from the past that your drinking has served to cover up and hide.
Through group pressure, 12-Step programs only ward off the craving
to drink, but real psychotherapy can bring you to the place where you no
longer even want to use alcohol as a
psychological defense
against your emotional life.
But, as I say
throughout this website, the psychotherapy process can be difficult and painful,
so there’s always the danger of relapse in moments when the emotional
pain seems to be overwhelming. If you do relapse, then you have to tell your
psychotherapist, and you have to tell your sponsor and everyone else in the
12-Step program. And you have to go back to Step One of the program and start
over again from the beginning. If you persevere through it all with patience
and discipline, though, you can actually achieve a state of mind in which
you “see through” the illusions of comfort that alcohol holds out,
such that alcohol cannot even tempt you anymore.
Now, in your
case, it seems that your psychotherapy has been successful so far in helping
you uncover the depths of your
unconscious anger.
This anger you experience now is not the result of your psychotherapy; in
fact, it’s really nothing new, because it is anger that has been inside
you all along and that you have been trying to avoid until now by drinking.
This sort of “anger turned inward” is also the cause of
depression. (It’s
also the cause of sloppy spelling and punctuation in your writing.) So
of course you feel worse than before, because now you have to feel the anger,
rather than drown it in alcohol and turn it against yourself in depression.
This is the core of the therapeutic work: to face emotions and talk about
them, not to hide them, push them away, or run from them.
When your
psychotherapist tells you that the answers lie within you, she simply means
that if you do the psychotherapeutic work with dedication and courage, you
will encounter
your deepest
fears—and your
deepest strengths—and you will find true healing.
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
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If
this website has helped you, then