There are many third parties who specialise in getting people back to work. I’m currently working with a company called Corpore who are organising my rehabilitation and now a company called Validium who are providing my Psychotherapy. If you recall, I dislike Psychologists. I dislike talking about what happened to me and I HATE discussing my feelings. I was like this before my accident and that part of my personality hasn’t changed. Writing things down is something I find very easy (I’ve kept a diary since I was 5) and perhaps that’s why I don’t feel the need to verbalise everything. It's a part of my personality that lots of people don’t understand; I’ve been called cold, hard and unfeeling in the past and been encouraged to surrender control in order to become a better person. This is me though, I’m a person who likes to be in charge and that makes me who I am. As one friend describes me, I'm the personification of the iron fist in the velvet glove...and I don't mind that at all.
The difficulty has been finding a therapy and a type of therapist who suits me and can work alongside my strong views on this subject. After all, I know it has been proven that people in therapy feel much better and have more successful recoveries overall. I don’t want to discount therapy as I want to help myself as much as possible.
Last week I went along to a Gestalt Centre to meet the Therapist I’ve been assigned, someone who has done a lot of work in Psychological Trauma. He also works with prison inmates, so he’s pretty hardcore I imagine. The type of therapy he works with comes under the branch of ‘humanistic therapy.’ This means they believe humans are inherently good. Gestalt Therapy treats counselling as a dialogue, rather than the injured being expected to come up with all the answers about themselves and their feelings. It concentrates on the experimental approach, involving action. This means they encourage you look at the blocks you are experiencing and come up with ways of combating them. Then you do just that….go away and put the ideas into action.
Gestalt is very focused on the present moment. Instead of looking over your shoulder into the hellish experience you’ve had, you look around you at what is happening now. It aims to create an awareness of your feelings so that you can change them and change your response. It sounds to me like they aim to give you control back……brilliant!
It also links closely to mindfulness which I’ve always been really interested in. We spend most of our day to day life ignoring how we feel and being prey to our moods. A lot of this is because we are surrounded and distracted by so much stimuli all the time, we rarely sit back and notice our physiological and mental being. Being mindful helps you be aware of what is happening to your ‘self’ and how your ‘self’ is reacting whether that be positive or negative. Once you know yourself better, you can work with yourself to get the best out of your life.
It’s with high hopes that I approach this type of therapy and I’m thinking of doing some more research into mindfulness while I’m at it. If anyone has had any experiences with Gestalt Therapy or other types of counselling, please speak up!
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