Psychotherapy Athens

Psychotherapy is the attempt to see yourself through the other. This is done from the first moment of life. It is the basic path through which one reaches the creation of oneself and the understanding of the particularities one has from genetic origins and from the influence of the environment.

Why are psychotherapy and childhood life alike?

All people who enter a systematic therapeutic work, begin to develop childish feelings in the therapy and project their parents to the therapist. The therapy is designed in such a way and the therapist is trained in such a way that they favor this direction of inner feelings that are hidden, repressed, repressed. All problems are the result of conflicts between wants-needs and the limits of prohibitions. THE transformations caused by these conflicts form a substrate beneath which lie the real feelings we feel when we are still in infancy, toddlerhood and childhood. From the moment of birth until six years of life, we know from clinical experience and long-term research that personality is created. This period of six years is repeated again in adolescent life, internally within us, in our psychological self. We relive it and make amends.

So we have a chance to cure them there. That is, adolescence is in itself an attempt at a psychotherapeutic approach. How exactly is it done? We use others as mirrors to see ourselves. To look inside and recognize our needs, our feelings, everything we desire and cannot have, i.e. what we would like to have and didn’t have, the deprivations, the frustrations, but also the feelings we experienced strongly and put them aside for a while. The same happens in the real psychotherapy that takes place when you start visiting a specialist who knows the psycho-emotional development of the person, knows what kind of obstacles there may be and specializes in you. He sees you, learns you, understands you and diagnoses where the problem is. This diagnosis is done for a certain purpose: to understand your problem and stand in such a way that it is not the same as when the environment could not stand properly against these problems. Treatment is the repetition of childhood life but with the appropriate behavior of the environment.

Psychotherapy helps to understand oneself

In therapy we say what comes to mind. Especially when we consider this something stupid, unspeakable, small, little, unimportant, etc. Within this belittling we do by characterizing our thought or our feeling as unspeakable, there is a deep desire to talk about it. No one ever mentions anything without importance. Everything that happens is relevant. From this general principle we begin to see everything. We don’t leave things to their fate. We intervene and find what is hidden there. This unconscious connection that will lead us to something. This something is not something the therapist knows beforehand. We find this something together. It is yourself. It is the journey through the first period of life where you were fused with mother to be safe, where you had small frustrations that happened when mom moved away and fear flooded your core, where you endured and understood that you were alive even though she was gone for a while, where you were trying to do something to live, and where you finally saw that despite the difficult period of loneliness and the cold coldness of the environment which had taken on a black and distant color, you lived, fought, stayed there and continued.

Abortions in infancy should not be long or serious problems will arise. Life is synonymous with frustrations. I want something but I can’t have it. Abort. But if I have received love, i.e. presence with caress and interest in me, then I tolerate them. Otherwise, I either become too demanding or nothing fills the void, so I find a way to fill it with self-destruction, with substances, with gambling, with dependent relationships that suffocate the other, with isolation, with masochistic behavior towards myself. To be able to hold up a mirror to show them where they are hurt and how they feel about it and to be able to share that feeling is healing. This is what we do in therapy.

The emotional approach to oneself

It’s one of the most powerful things that happens. You are mirrored. You see you. And in there, in this mirror, we see what feelings exist and what has happened. Everything is visible in the relationship. The other day I had a patient tell me how hurt he felt and he repeated it in every session but didn’t let it show. He was saying it covertly. Five or six sessions passed and then I noticed that at some point I was being removed. I began to think that I was not paying attention to my patient. Why; I thought about it. And then I realized that this was the feeling he had inside. And I told him: “I have a feeling that I hear you without hearing you.” He heard it and then it came out that he hides it diligently, that he feels lonely and that now that I tell him, he feels closer to me. What had happened; I wanted to take care of him but without realizing it I was repeating what his mother did when he was an infant and a toddler. This was causing him such anxiety that he couldn’t even say how abandoned he felt. Almost neglected. In some way transferable, he had given me the message that we cannot communicate despite my willingness to help him. Finally by paying attention to the feelings that had been created in me during that session, we managed to break a piece of ice that stood as a heavy barrier to our communication. Such efforts bear fruit because the relationship acquires a meaning: “one feels oneself emotionally and not logically.”

The therapeutic role of the self

My experience in the field of psychotherapy shows me that people heal when you manage to become an imaginary extension of themselves. This means you feel how they feel without losing yourself. Why is this therapeutic? It is therapeutic because the patient first of all sees himself in you, and understands that he can become like you as he imagines you. A complete self, not afraid to live with the obstacles that arise. This is how the patient sees the therapist, as an omnipotent father, as a parent, as a mother who provides emotional intimacy (nurture), and sometimes with various other roles and emotional investments. So there we make reparations that lead to the separation of the patient and to his autonomy as an entity. But the road to the autonomy of the self passes through the districts of fusion. So we grow up in therapy little by little as we grew up when we were infants but this time with a closer to ourselves experiential approach. This is our self-healing.

The Pleasure In Life

The end result of a psychotherapy is nothing more than a person who can enjoy his life by having meaningful relationships with other people. That’s why, after all, the cure is the group. Even when we do individual therapy, during the session I see in my mind the patient’s father, his mother, his siblings, that is, the relationships that have developed during his life between him and others.

Those relationships and feelings that are hidden there, repressed and wanting to be heard, those relationships and those feelings shape our lives. So when you hate your wife but you experience hatred with the therapist, a hatred that you don’t understand, and suddenly an experience from your childhood comes to you, an incident where it was obvious that you hated your brother for example, then you connect them inside , you express your anger to the therapist and he, if he knows his job, has already understood what is happening, so he understands your anger, whether it is justified or unjustified. Jealousy for a new member in the family has both justified and unjustified elements for example.

So a whole hidden fundamental issue that has been defining your life begins to come to the surface of consciousness. There is a difficult moment when I hold the patient like a baby in my arms sometimes, and sometimes like a child who is angry or bitter or aggressive. This kind of transfer of feelings to the therapist happens many times during a psychotherapy. That’s why the treatment is long-term, that’s why the therapist is paid, that’s why the person starts to feel more of his real hidden self. It is a process that over time leads us to live our lives minute by minute and relationship by relationship. To see what is important and what is unimportant in life and to live our age, our desire but also the depth of the relationships that are the essence of life.

*Republication of the article is prohibited without the written permission of the author

The process of psychotherapy requires commitment, dedication and is only for those who seriously see that they need to change their lives. If you are thinking of starting this journey, call me at 211 71 51 801 to make an appointment and see together how I can help you

Mixalis Paterakis
Psychologist Psychotherapist
University of Indianapolis – University of Middlesex
I accept by appointment
Karneadou 37 Kolonaki (Next to Evangelismos)
Tel: 211 71 51 801
www.mixalispaterakis.gr
www.psychotherapy.net.gr