Prickly bits

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: learning how to be vulnerable in front of others legitimately turned my life around. I could not recommend it enough. Yet, let me tell you that it’s not a walk in the park. Like everything else worthwhile in life, it comes at a price. You know, terms and conditions apply.

Healing happens in relationships

What I love most about psychotherapy is that everything I learn, I can easily fit into my own life experiences. It all makes perfect sense and I barely ever need any research to prove it, just because I gathered enough proofs on my own already. And it goes deeper: I believe that as different as we all may be, all human experiences are universal. We all carry them inside us. And this is the reason why at the core of psychotherapy, lies relationship. Relationship with yourself, your family, your friends, your partner, with people in the larger sense, with your beliefs, your environment, the world. We’re all social creatures, we’re not wired to live inside our own heads all the time, we need some external connections. Some reality checks, as I like to call them.  

And this is precisely why therapeutic healing cannot happen outside of relationship with another human being (be it formal or informal). No matter how many wise psychological books you’ll read, no matter how many notebooks you’ll fill with scrupulous writing, without connecting to another human being, you achieve little in terms of actual healing. Some useful knowledge at best, but knowledge without tools to utilise it, doesn’t do much.  

Floating in the Forth

I’m not the kind of person who cares about well-known people passing away all that much. I’m generally against making a big (public) deal of anyone’s death (whatever the cause), and the last thing I wish to achieve here, is to advertise some not-so-well-known Scottish band only through their recent, tragic end. But I just can’t stay silent, not in the given circumstances.

The chances are that you have never heard about Frightened Rabbit up to this point: point of reading (either here now or on any Scottish news page week ago) that their singer died suddenly, aged 36. But sad as it is, maybe now is actually the perfect time to get to know them…