Stepping off the island

Hello and welcome to my first blog post.

The spectre of Covid and the threat of restriction still haunt our lives but a year ago we were in even choppier waters, well into the second national lockdown and with the pressures of our limited freedoms beginning to bite. Prolonged proximity to our homes and families were contributing to crises in emotional health and relationships where “cabin fever” threatened to set in.

Even in more relaxed times our psyches can be affected by ”cabin fever” where our “room for manoeuvre“ in life and relationships can feel very limited indeed. We might have some increased freedom to travel now and to escape stress but this will offer scant comfort if we carry with us outdated and clunky emotional software so that wherever we go history repeats itself. Where does that emotional software come from? It might be from our parents or important caregivers, it might be a teacher or on the day that Azeem Rafiq gave shuddering testimony to Parliament it might come from our sports clubs.

When I chose the name “archipelago” for my psychotherapy practice I had in mind potential clients who might be getting frustrated and constricted by living in the same, cramped emotional space for much of the time. What we may grow up experiencing as “home base” could have done very well for us in life or it may have been a frightening and uneasy place. But like an archipelago, “the whole self“ is a much larger and grander reality than one little island that we grew up with. The Self contains parts and aspects that have their own terrains, contours and emotional ecosystems.

You may have grown up on an “island“ where the weather was always sunny and bright and where you weren’t allowed to be angry or irritable. It might be useful to discover how this helped you become the person you are but also how it limited you. In time you might discover the part of you “pushed to the edge of your map” where the anger was exiled to. Alternatively, your familiar terrain might be one where kindness or any number of other values where not in the landscape.

Therapy is an invitation to know yourself in a new way, to discover a trusting and safe setting where you can step away from “home base”, maybe just fleetingly but in doing so glimpsing the next necessarily step that might lead to an expanded awareness and a richer experience of self and others.

In the next few months, some of us may get the chance to escape our preoccupations and take in some winter sun but I’d also like to suggest that a course of therapy can take you on a inner journey of discovery and the benefits are going to last a lot longer than a week in the Med.