My New Year’s resolution: helping you defeat self-sabotage

Having settled into my new life in Europe I am ready to get serious about my Inside Out Therapy and Coaching practice. I need to work on connecting with the wider Brussels community, but I trust that’s a matter of time. Meanwhile, I have been thinking a lot about how I can be of service in the best possible way.
During the last few years I have been seeing clients with a kaleidoscope of issues, from neuralgia, anxiety, depression, bipolarity, chronic pain, alcoholism, fibromyalgia, to relationship problems and more. What all have in common is trauma, mostly from childhood. Some people have been consistently turning up for a weekly appointment. Others have dipped in and out, sometimes staying away for months on end and then calling or mailing again for an appointment.
I too have been one of those ‘free agents’. I would deliberate with myself for a long time whether or not a new treatment was a good fit, or whether a new therapist was the right person for me. Often, when I felt relieved by our session I would only go back when the effect had totally worn off and I needed another ‘fix’. And I never spent a very long time with any particular therapist.
It was a great way to get a taste of the many different methods available, and to collect techniques that worked best for me. But now that I’m helping people myself I realise that it’s not the most efficient way to heal oneself. I have come to understand that the reason I never fully trusted any therapist to be able to help me was a form of self-sabotage. I remember the little voice in my head that used to sneer at me: ‘So you think you have a problem? Give me a break. You’re just being difficult, begging for attention again. Who do you think you are?’
The words of the little voice were, I see now, expressing the very problem that I was struggling with: I believed I didn’t deserve to feel better, I wasn’t worthy of even wanting to heal. I now recognise that I would have benefitted from someone explicitly telling me that my problems were totally legitimate, no matter what they were. That feeling unhappy was not being difficult, but deserved proper attention.
Unravelling our subconscious patterns and blockages can sometimes be a murky process, but I now know that there is a path one needs to follow in order to get clarity. Sometimes a client and I can feel as if we’re groping in the dark, but in each consecutive session, more pieces of the puzzle do actually start fitting together.
This realisation has led me to the idea of offering my services as a package that people need to sign up to. I will design different formats (short or long term), but the aim would be to give people a roadmap with stations to be reached within a certain time-frame. I promise to do everything in my power to help you achieve the goal you set at the beginning of our journey, and you would have to commit to that journey. That in itself would be the first step to get out of the negative spiral of self-depreciation and start respecting yourself.
I’m putting this idea out here to get feedback. Any comments or suggestions are most welcome. I wish you a very happy New Year full of love, especially for yourself!

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