What is "Working Through?" In Detail, Please!

Okay. I'm in therapy. I've achieved some of what I think are pretty major insights. Now I'm led to understand that after insights comes "working through." Kind of chasing down all the ramified, neuron-like connections between the area affected by an insight and all the other parts of my thinking and feeling.

Well and good. But I very much want to conduct this "working through" in as energetic and concentrated a fashion as I used to get the insights. No nonsense. Complete seriousness. How does one do "working through" in that manner?

For example. I've realized that dear old Mom was a complete turkey at raising babies. With truly horrible effects. From the beginning until now, this instant, I'm terrified when dealing with people. Not you, you're safely far away. I can't see your faces or hear your voices. And that's very comforting indeed. But I'd like to be able not to see the people I meet IRL as terribly dangerous. And I understand "working through" is the way to get there.

Any tips?

Well I'm sure that just as everyone's experience that has led them to therapy is different so is there way of working through. So the only think I can offer up is my own experience. I've been in therapy 9 months now and still have lots of issues that I haven't worked through...but for me "working through" means not just talking about an issue or insight but...
- acknowledging the existence of feelings that go along with them
- actually "feeling" those feelings (not dissociating from them)
- accepting those feelings
- looking at the impact of those feelings and the issue/insight on the past
- addressing any RL impact of those feelings and the issue/insight in the now..
- making any changes to my thinking and behavior in the now...changes of things that may not be healthy as an adult but learned as a child..

those are just for me and may not apply to you but I hope it provides some insights..

only "tip" I have to offer is to have patience.

Hmmm. Readytostop says part of "working through" is not only identifying where feelings come from but also "actually feeling those feelings."

And I haven't done that yet. I'm not sure, but I'd guess that I'm very, very frightened indeed at "feeling those feelings."

What do you need to do to get into contact with those feelings? How do you do it? Do you rely more on T to evoke those feelings? Is that more part of her job? I really don't want to mess around on these things. I want to go straight ahead. Suggestions?

you could start with the fear of dealing with ppl irl, ygrec. you mentioned that in your quote.

in the next quote it deals with an effective technique for us to deal with those feelings as they surface cause they can be overwhelming.
and yes, your therapist can work with you on your unknown fears/feelings to get them to the surface of your consciousness. to me feelings are not facts. but we can block that info of feeling to protect ourselves nevertheless, imo. some feelings are distorted/false beliefs. like ptsd. with these with your T's help you will learn new tools to discard them and replace them with real beliefs, i.e. your mother and you fearing others as well. like your way of coping all this time has been to distance yourself from others. however that was out of fear-a feeling. and false belief.
and "working through" to me is a process. some challenges i find are easier than others to resolve. a lot of it for me in therapy had to be dealt with slowly cause it was so painful/feelings. it seemed like i was reliving the events and i was. i know you are excited about this revelation you've discovered but it is just the beginning of your journey. don't allow what i've said to stop you-know you are eager-but your T will help you move at the pace that is best for you.

I journal and then reread my stuff. I share with T even though I am scared. I know that sometimes you have to feel the old stuff all over again and be in a continual state of forgiveness. You can write a letter to your mom or to your inner child. I think the A.A. serenity prayer is a pretty good summation of working through. Acceptance. PEACE TO YOU

I am struck by your strong motivation. It sounds like you don't want to waste time or take a circuitous route. My journey has not been so direct! I would suggest talking to your therapist about her ideas for how to proceed. She knows you well and probably has some good ideas. Also, would you be able to give yourself permission to go slowly if you need to? If you try going fast and you aren't getting where you want to go, slowing it down might help. Sometimes a slower pace gets you to your goals more quickly. There have been some times when my T was cautious about where we were going because he didn't want to hurt me or see me in pain. He needed some reassurance that I wanted to keep going that day... So try to keep on the same page as your T. Let her know if it's too fast or slow and see what she says. My T is a fan of "quick" therapies like EMDR for trauma. He says there are many trauma techniques and he's settled on doing mostly EMDR because of its speed. So you can ask your T about different routes to the same goal and which might be fastest or best suited for your personality.

Interesting questions. I never thought of my T as deliberately trying to evoke my feelings. He made his office a very safe place for me to feel things and himself a very safe person to share my feelings with. So he didn't really evoke my feelings, but made expression of them possible.

Good luck!

there's certainly no magic bullet or mythical formula. what its going to take is practice. you have the insight, i'm assuming you have an idea of why you feel that way. so, now its time to make a conscious and concerted effort to do something different.

talk back to those thoughts that run through your head. the ones you KNOW are irrational. fight that instinct to run and hide. take a chance and see what happens. if you do what you always do, you'll get what you've always gotten.

you can work through those thins in therapy and if you are fearful, certainly thats where you should start.

i work residential, so i have the freedom (and the captive audience!) to do lots of different types of things to evoke emotional experiences. writing letters to various people, trauma art work (this works big time!) and various experiential exercises that can be done in the group.

on an outpatient basis, you may be able to do any of those things...

I also journaled and reread my stuff. Also kept asking why am I like this? what led me to feel this way? and backtracked a lot till I got to the root of my issue. The facts were what helped me feel better and allowed me to be compassionate towards myself.

there is no write or wrong way to work through something.

the wording "work through it" means the same thing in mental health as it does for say working through your finance problems.

you take it one step at a time, identify the problem, identify the cause, then figure out what you need to do about that problem and then do it.

you have identified the problem -

you have problems seeing people as dangerous.

you have identified the cause -

you feel your mother "was a complete turkey at raising babies. With truly horrible effects"

ok so now what do you want to do about this? do you want to confront your mother. do you want to find ways that will ensure you dont follow in her footsteps, be a better parent then she was, do you not want to do anything about this at all or do nothing about it. what do you need to do for yourself that will enable you to go on with your life and not have your mothers lack of parenting skills affect you and the rest of your life.

thats what working through things means. and people do this in many ways..

some people use -

confrontation
journaling
their creativity
gardening
taking their anger out in appropriate ways
talking with a friend
talking with their treatment providers...

the ways and how a person works through their problems are endless..

it all depends on what works for you.

my way of working through my problems is through running and being out in nature. A lot of times when I have to work something out I will go down to the lake and take my canoe out around the lake and let the natural setting and calmness of the lake help me figure out what I need to do about my problems and how I can move beyond that problem. I also have my therapist, my wife, my physician and my psychiatrist that I can go to, talk the problem out with.

After reading your breakthrough thread and now this one, I see that we both have mother issues - specifically issues from a mother who was unfit and did not love her children. I also have only brothers, one of whom is an alcoholic. I don't know where you stand in birth order - I was firstborn. I would say that my mother is responsible for the early death of my father at the age of 45. Yes, she was that cold.

Abuse and neglect by my mother has haunted me my entire life and has been very emotionally painful to deal with. Because of the abuse, I have never dated and have had trouble making and keeping friends. And, I've suffered from depression for years and apparently (recently diagnosed by my T) also suffered from complex PTSD. Further, I have repeated the pattern of my childhood by staying in abusive jobs.

Dealing with this issue is not something to rush into. I've tried treating it with many different psychological modalities; some of which have not been effective at all (avoid CBT & EMDR). Psychoanalysis / psycho-dynamics seem to work best for me though I have never made much progress with my life. Frankly, even with the insights from therapy, my life seems hopeless. I never received parenting essentials that are necessary to succeed.

There is hope if you were the youngest of your siblings. My youngest brother turned out alright from the help of his older brothers and good friends and their parents. I hope that your journey is more successful than mine and wish you all the best.

Working through is realizing that all dear old moms who look alike, aren't, and that person in front of you probably isn't going to hurt you, based on experience now (relying heavily on the logic of knowing that person in front of you doesn't know you, why would they want to spend the energy hurting someone they don't know and how could they, since they don't know you specifically enough to know what would hurt you: you're as different as they are).

Until now, you have been looking at all the dear old moms without knowing it, concentrating on this "mass" of beings and not able to differentiate (think Matrix with them all Agent Smith, Brown, Jones, etc.) but now you know your dear old mom better and can compare/see some slight differences. Not all mothers are turkeys raising their children. You'll be able to pick out some while shopping who aren't, who listen to their kids and try to help them while everyone is shopping together or you'll notice other moms who might be turkeys but they're turkeys in different ways than yours was.

As you get better at identifying the differences, you'll get better at dealing with the individuals, get more self-confident that you can differentiate and deal by yourself. It's a matter of practice; you haven't had any experience so you're new at it and it's of course scary, you're not sure you can do it. Working through is just learning something new, can be made into an intellectual exercise almost (at least you can think of it that way, can't practice it like that though).

Find more easily differentiated individuals who aren't as scary to take on first (I love sales/grocery clerks; you can ask them inane questions like when they get off work, get their next break, ask them aren't they glad they're indoors when it's cold or rainy, etc.).

Make it a bit of a game; see how many people you can start a conversation with in a single day or dare yourself, when one greets you, to tell them something personal about yourself (that you're tired because you didn't sleep well, the neighbor's dogs bark too much, you like rain because it gives you a bit of a rest from your depression; it's harder when you feel depressed when the sun is out, etc.)

I can't. My mortality hangs over me like the traditional sword of Damocles.

Of course. I trust T and will be happy to do what she suggests. My only concern is that she seems somewhat unaware of all the recent (10-20 years) discoveries in developmental theory and related fields. I would have to guess that at least a significant part of my prior lack of success in therapy (many moons ago) was due to the great difficulty, amounting pretty close to impossibility, that my then T's had with pre-verbal, pre-memory psychopathologies. Traditional Freudians of course had a problem there. They couldn't stick me in an Oedipal cubbyhole. So much has happened in that regard over the past thirty years!

No problem. Whatever it takes. Faster or slower, but steady progress.

Sure.

No problem. Though I must admit to a prejudice against cognitive behavioral stuff. And it's a strong prejudice. I really hate behaviorists. There's something, to me, personally offensive about their ideas. Don't know why.

Thanks! I just may need it!

Now I think that's a GREAT idea! I'll start today! Thank you! Take care.

Sounds like we've got a lot in common, unhappyguy! But also a few differences sprinkled here and there. Let's go!

I, too, was number one, with three younger brothers, all of whom had really big problems.

It's been painful enough for me so that I could never even think about it or realize it or in any way conceptualize it. I never had (even with all my former T's) the slightest idea it was connected with my mother. So the prospect of dealing with all those repressed feelings is rather ominous to me.

I did get married, but by chance I found a person who (entirely unconsciously) I was completely convinced could never hurt me. And over 42 years she hasn't. Oh, she's tried! The usual fights and tiffs and even her physically hitting me. But because she is who she is, somehow none of that hurts and I actually knew that in advance. How I knew it, I haven't any idea. No friends here either.

Yeah, me too. CBT is out. My T does psychodynamic psychotherapy and that's where I feel comfortable.

Well, as I mentioned, I'm the oldest, the one with the heaviest dose. But my poor baby brother has been an alcoholic all his life, completely rejecting any kind of AA or rehab. So sometimes moms can be bad enough to ruin all of their children. Thanks and Take care!

Well, Terry, the bolded words in the quote convey to me an image of someone working with words, and for me, the universe of words can't even get close to the feelings I need to go through. I feel I need to take advantage of whatever successful techniques exist that permit one to go back before language, before "thought", before memory. At the moment I haven't the vaguest idea how to do that.

I try to put myself in the situation of a pre-verbal baby, not yet a toddler, entirely dependent on Mom, yet with a Mom who's not interested in "psychological contact" or "communication" or even physical contact. I guess that baby would feel terrified. All of his needs have to be supplied by this woman who's not in touch, who seems to WANT to be "not in touch." He's trapped! She's his lifeline and she dumped the rope! But I can't feel it "all over and inside." Wish I knew what to do. Take care.

But they're not thoughts. They're just feelings. And I've fought those feelings all my life, tooth and nail, and they've never changed or gone away. Just to live I've had to fight those feelings, to make a living. And they're still there. I don't think this desensitization business is going to work on me. It hasn't in the past, though I must admit that I was doing it entirely on my own and don't know if what I've done really qualifies as "densitization," whatever that may include. Thanks! Take care!

Thank you, amandalouise! I never thought that "working through" could be so different. To me, "working through" means you start with feelings or situations that cause you pain or are otherwise uncomfortable. You then identify the cause or causes of those feelings or situations. And then you do whatever it takes to make those current, present-day noxious feeling or situations go away permanently. That "doing whatever it takes" is what I understand "working through" to be. Though for me that's still a blank that I have to fill in. "Insight" got me to the cause. But I have no idea what will lead to the eradication of the ramifications of the cause. So I'll start with what T suggests and, if those don't work, I'll be looking for other things too. Take care!

The therapies my T and I used to work through pre-verbal, infant stuff were EMDR and ego state therapy. We had to do this early-in-life work before I could move forward in my life, because I had some big problems to tackle and was totally stuck. We also did some post-verbal, young work (child-aged). For me, ego state therapy was particularly powerful, and did evoke a lot of feelings. (My T also uses Lifespan Integration therapy, but we didn't formally do that--it has some similarities to ego state therapy and we did use some of its elements.) When I first came to therapy, my T said I was one of the most contained people he had met--where were those feelings? So I've been helped by therapy a lot in learning to detect, feel, and express my feelings. That is really good old fashioned psychotherapy, so if your issues include not being able to feel your feelings, you may find you don't need the most recently developed techniques for that. On the other hand, maybe they would be just the ticket--I think I needed something really powerful to help me. What is powerful to a person varies with the individual, of course. (CBT is not a technique that could help me with my problems.) Ygrec, if you do decide that you need the most up-to-date techniques to help you, and you think your T doesn't have them, does that mean you will seek out another T? Ask your T to learn these techniques? Try them on your own?

For information on Lifespan Integration Therapy:
http://www.lifespanintegration.com
Lifespan Integration is a new technique which promotes rapid healing in adults who experienced abuse and/or neglect during childhood. This new method relies on the innate ability of the body-mind to heal itself. Lifespan Integration uses a psychological technique called an "affect bridge" to find a memory which is connected to the current problem. The therapist guides the client to imaginally re-visit this past memory, bringing into the past whatever is needed to resolve the memory. After the memory is resolved, the therapist leads the client through time to the present using a Time Line of visual images of scenes from the client's life. This Time Line of memories and images proves to the client's body-mind system that time has passed and that life is different now. This "proof" occurs at a deeper level than is possible with commonly used cognitive behavioral [talk therapy] methods.

[QUOTE][HTML]Hi Y, actually, words were not what helped me so much as memories. Perhaps you could substitute "memories" for "feelings"?

I hope that you know that your being unloved by your mother was not your fault. and she probably had issues with her mother or father and you can probably scroll back and see the neverending cycle of unfulfilled needs. Is there a way you could find out more about your mother's upbringing? Maybe she was a girl who did not feel loved either and so did not have the tools to be a loving parent? Not trying to make excuses for her, just hoping it might help you understand why she was the way she was. Not sure where that might lead. Not sure if understanding the whys will fill that hole in your heart, but perhaps it is worth a try?

Well, Terry, truth is, I can't remember back that far. I believe we're talking about one to two years, give or take several months. The earliest memory I have is from being at my grandmother's while my mother was in the hospital having my next brother. So that would have been when I was two years and seven days old. That's as far as I can get. If you're able to get back further, how do you do so?

That's exactly what T and I did. And in fact, my crowning insight took place on the day that I gave T the last installment of fact and interpretation about my mother's history. She had a particularly bad early childhood, not because of anything inherent in either of my grandparents, but because of external facts of history that touched their lives deeply. It was quite a special situation that probably didn't happen to all that many other people. And I think I'll stop there. I don't know that I feel a hole in my heart. Other people when discussing childhood emotional abuse talk about emptiness, but I don't feel that. But then maybe I do and just take it for granted. Thanks for your help!

That's very helpful, sunrise, thank you! EMDR and ego state therapy. I'll research both of them. And yes, my issues very much include not being able to reach my feelings. The only reason that I raised that issue of "up-to-dateness" is because I know that with the new developments T's are trying to go backwards and deal with infant and toddler pathology. And I've had, as I've said, experience way back when with T's who seemed flummoxed by very early infant and toddler problems. I might well be wrong, though, and their incapacity at that time may not have been or may have been due to other factors. As to what I would do in the event T can't handle it, I don't know. I'm perfectly happy letting her try everything she can and dealing with what else to try after we get to that point.

Thanks again for the information!

I have a friend about my age who has cancer. She is single and has never gotten married, she's never had a professional job and she has never finished the degree she's been working on for many years. She told me something someone said to her the other day- the person said "you have really lived." She agreed, she felt she has really lived. She said she doesn't have any regrets. Even though I think I want the things I listed in my life, my friend is my role model for a good life. When I think of a meaningful life, the picture that comes to my mind is her small apartment. Having someone my age possibly about to die makes me more aware I may not have forever. I want to be like her in many ways, especially I want to be able to experience the end of my life, if I have the opportunity to know it is coming, the way she is doing it, which is appreciating and enjoying what she can in the time she has. I think about it as I spend time in therapy. I have to be ready at any moment to let go of my hopes for the future; the things I hoped to achieve in therapy. I wouldn't be happy to do it, but it would be better to accept and appreciate what I have than to fight it emotionally more than I can help it. It's a heck of a lot easier to write this now than to think about it when I'm with her. Anyway, thinking of needing to be ready for that at any moment lets me appreciate the life experience I've had a little more, even though what I've accomplished in life so far is not what most people aspire to. I'm behind for my age in the getting married department, and too late for having kids. It isn't always easy to balance the desire to grow with the desire to appreciate the moment. I guess from PC I'm learning how to take my time and not rush therapy too much. Well, at least for the moment I'm doing better with that.

I think I'm probably preaching to the choir and that you understand this more meaningfully than I do ygrec. You seem deeply intelligent and caring.

Expressing your feelings in therapy is a must for working through issues. Besides that, I chose an issue that was affecting me at the moment and started working on it when it happened by becoming more aware when it happened, paying attention to how I felt and how I was reacting and then processing it later. Eventually I was able to make changes in how I reacted with the issue. The work was gradual.

Do you think that you can do this with your issue with other people?

[QUOTE]You can remember so far back! I can only get back to when I was six. I know you are overwhelmed by your feelings right now but they will probably calm down later on. When I said "memories", I just meant to think of the things that bothered you from your past, at any age, and to try to delve into the whys and wherefores.

Well, even if it is not emptiness, I hope that your new revelations will heal whatever is making you sad. Do keep us posted on your progress. Take care now--