Courage in Therapy

I am going on about courage for so long here because it is important. I encourage you to have courage because of what it can mean for your life. I firmly agree with Amelia Earhart when she said, "Courage is what life asks for granting us peace."

The act of being in treatment both requires courage and creates courage. I have had patients who needed their spouse to help pay for therapy and their being in therapy required them to have the courage to tell their spouse that they were worth it and that therapy was important enough to them to spend the money on it .They had to have the courage then to tolerate the frustration of not spending money on something else so they can have the money for therapy.

It may seem like an everyday occurrence but every time one of my patient's takes a medication I have prescribed they are showing the courage to put something new to them in their mouth and to put up with possible side effects in the hope of getting better later...

I admire patient's having the courage to talk about themselves and to look at themselves even though it may mean doing something different or being anxious about what they see. I realize that my patients have come to recognize that George Santana was right when he said that a man who refuses to learn from the past is condemned to repeat it.

I'm proud when patients little by little have the courage to try to do something new or to do something old in a different more adaptive way. It could be being in public, or giving up a ritual, or speaking up for them. I have watched as patients showed the patience and persistence to work at their difficult marriage or the courage to leave when it is hopeless or abusive.

Sometimes courage means a willingness to see things as they really are. Recovering people talk about the need for honesty and calling things what they are. They strive to be honest about themselves and their life. The patient recovering from addiction realizes honesty is as vital to them as breath and works at developing the courage to look honestly at themselves with the help of the recovering community and their Higher Power. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye." I don't think it is too far from this to say that one must also be whole hearted about the work of therapy and this takes courage.

Gautama Buddha spoke of having the courage to see things as they are, not centered on the self, in order to get to the raw experience and then to trust in what is seen. The therapy process is somewhat analogous to that. It is a process of trying to understand process and patterns and having the courage to tolerate, little by little, the anxiety associated with the looking. It takes courage to look and to believe in your ability to see and to trust in what you have seen. It takes courage to have faith in the correctness of your perceptions. Chogyam Trungpa described this process as getting out of a cocoon. He is encouraging because he believes that what would be perceived ultimately is the Basic Goodness that perfuses life and that is a part of us all. Westerner's might describe it as experiencing God's love manifest in the world. It might be the peace that Amelia Earhart was alluding to.

Pema Chodren has written about the benefits of having the courage to sit in difficult situations and consequently learn to empathize with others in similar situations. She feels this makes the person more alive and connected to others.