When the symptom becomes a threshold to listen to

There are moments when something interrupts the usual way we were living.

It can be on a mental, physical or relational level. Sometimes it is simply the feeling, hard even to name, that we can no longer go on exactly as before.

It is understandable that the first question is: how do I feel better? But in psychotherapeutic work it can become important to add another one: what is happening in my life while this symptom appears right now?

This does not mean automatically attributing a symbolic meaning to what happens. It means allowing ourselves the possibility of listening to discomfort as part of our own story as well.

From this perspective, the symptom is not only something to make disappear as soon as possible, nor necessarily an enemy to fight. It can become something to listen to and understand, without losing sight of the need to relieve the suffering it brings.

The symptom is not the whole person

When we suffer, the problem easily takes over the entire field.

• ·I have anxiety.
• ·I am depressed.
• ·I can't sleep.
• ·My body doesn't work.
• ·My relationships always end in the same way.
• ·My shoulder, knee, hip, head always hurts...

The risk is that the person progressively comes to coincide with what is happening to them.

In an integrated psychotherapy approach, a different space opens up: I am not my symptom. I am living something that deserves to be understood, because my evolution and my spiritual growth also pass through it.

This is not about idealizing suffering. A symptom can be painful, limiting and require specialist support. But alongside the question «how can I reduce it?» we can begin to ask ourselves:

• ·What is it trying to protect?
• ·When did it appear?
• ·What was happening in my life at that moment?
• ·What happens when I try to ignore it?
• ·What is my relationship with my body while all this is happening?

The body also takes part in our story

We do not live experiences only through thought. We live them breathing, contracting, moving, holding back, approaching and moving away. The body continuously takes part in the way we meet the world and other people.

For this reason, in an integrated psychotherapeutic perspective, it can be useful not to work only through words. Breath, movement, body perception, imagination and awareness practices can become different doorways to the same experience.

From symptom to threshold

A threshold is a particular place: it belongs neither completely to what we are leaving nor to what we are moving towards. Many psychological crises arise in a phase of transition, during a change that has not yet been fully processed.

A loss, a separation, an illness, an important change or an existential crisis can lead us to ask who we are, what direction our life has, what truly has value.

The old balance no longer works, but the new one does not exist yet.

It is an uncomfortable condition. We often want to resolve it quickly, return to normality, recover what we were before. Therapeutic work consists neither in going back nor in rushing forward.

It consists in accompanying the person to become aware of what that passage involves, including the inner experience of the search for meaning: what might it become by crossing that crisis? Which resources and still-unexpressed possibilities for change might be born?

This is where, for some people, a transpersonal dimension can also open up. «Transpersonal» means going beyond the horizontal plane, linked to the person, and being able to access a broader, vertical dimension that includes the spiritual level in one's life path.

You don't always need to know where to start

Many people arrive at a first meeting without a perfectly formulated question. And that is normal. Sometimes there is a symptom. Other times a crisis. Other times only the perception that something must change.

The first work can be exactly this: stopping, listening to what is happening and understanding together which path makes sense in that moment and for that person.

Discomfort can then gradually transform into a possibility of understanding, growth and change. What today appears mainly as an obstacle can also become an opportunity to know yourself more deeply and to recover resources that, at that moment, seemed no longer available.

Sometimes, precisely what we would have simply wanted to make disappear becomes the point from which we finally begin to look at ourselves in a new way.