By Gili Cook
Opening in the Room
Some people arrive in my office after therapy has already helped them understand themselves better. They can tell when they are becoming overwhelmed, and they know how to breathe, ground, and slow down. They carry the demands of work, relationships, and family, managing life as they understand it. And still, something stays slightly outside, on the periphery of their own life. A person may know they love someone yet feel distant from that love.
Sometimes, when I ask what makes them happy, they start listing. They know the answers, but listing what brings happiness isn’t the same as feeling it as they speak. Others say it more plainly: life is happening, but I feel as if I am standing just beside it.
I have come to think of this as being present enough to function but not present enough to live.
That gap shaped the question I began to organize my work around: not only how we help a nervous system move out of overwhelm, but how more of life becomes accessible, and how freely a person can participate in it without losing themselves.
Regulation is not a small achievement, and I do not treat it as a preliminary stage before something more important. It is much of what makes any of this possible. But it is not always the end of the work.
What Becomes Accessible
Protection is not an error to be removed, nor a shell with truth waiting behind it. When protective organization becomes less dominant, experiences that were less accessible may become more available. What appears is not known in advance. It may be anger, fear, grief, pleasure, longing, curiosity, creativity, a boundary, an impulse to move closer or further away. Sometimes it is eros.
This still does not tell us what it means, so one of my central questions has become: what is becoming accessible now? That is a different question from what is supposed to emerge. It is followed immediately by a second: what else might it be? What other possibility is there?
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Artwork: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay