Taking Speaking & Listening Therapies into Top Gear

Speaking & Listening Therapies here work on strengthening your mental and emotional processing mechanism. Your coping skills are enhanced and reinforced. Your perception of your behaviour, feelings or trauma changes. With therapy you are empowered to appreciate past events, your role in them, and the people in your life. With a more positive frame of mind, you see an improvement in your health and overall well-being.

Speaking & Listening Therapies’s transformative potential will not stop at the door of you having the skills to handle hot-potato type situations and emotions. There is still the top gear left in their toolbox.

Here you will soon enter a powerful realm of maturing from a “what to do” mental set up when faced with issues to a more empowering “how to be” frame of mind. It is a level where you’ll be pensive, become an empathetic listener yourself, and respond to life’s situations more mindfully.

No no…you are not going to get stuck in being constantly absorbed in deep thoughts. On the contrary reality will become more alive for you, with you being more proactive.

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Speaking & Listening therapies may have explored your trauma, complex emotions and experiences, to such great details that it will help you make the switch into expressing appreciation for them. Instead of trying to constantly dodge or run away from these episodes in the past or present, you’ll be able to sit with them. Sometimes even with a degree of ease. Realisation will soon creep in that, “I had to go through all that to reach where I am now”.

What would begin as an unconscious transformation in you that will steadily become second nature. You shall be more sympathetic to others. You would start factoring in other people’s emotions, their perspective and their constraints, when dealing with them. For this to happen your therapist will actively encourage you to narrate incidences in inclusive tones. To tell a story not only from your perspective but also step into the shoes of others. For example, to talk about the sadness and the feeling of abandonment that grips you on account of the emotional distance with your son by also talking about your son’s possible grievances against you like your prioritising work over spending time with him.

Your practitioner will also gently guide you to freely examine your role in interpersonal arguments. Say there is a recent case of a shouting match between your lad and you, where accusations of disrespecting and hurting each other were hurled. When revisiting this episode with your therapist or alone, you analyse your own behaviour and words too. And may be even admit to your mistakes either during the argument or take a long term view of what did not go right in your relationship building efforts with your son during his crucial young years. If it is the latter it means you would have successfully imbibed the tools of coping mechanisms to such an extent that you are proactively applying it to other situations, sometimes without your therapist’s supervision.

A direct consequence of this would be a slow attitudinal shift cemented by therapy where you would become more forgiving of the human fallacies of others and yourself. You’ll slowly realise the pointlessness of cycles of constant arguments with your boy. You will be kinder to yourself and your son despite his harsh language towards you. Your practitioner will smoothly steer you towards sharpening your desired objectives from pressing issues aka ultimate life goals. Namely wanting to focus on dissolving your child’s fury and replacing it with happy memories of his time spent with you.

Via therapy the immovable nature of your beliefs that lead your behaviour in a certain way would become more apparent to you. Your practitioner would help you to seize this awareness to nimbly manoeuvre your life’s logic and its paradoxes. Thus with every subsequent change, you’ll gradually break out of your past tendency to resist change out of a confounded need to defend your self-identity. Such as you might not struggle as much to forget the furious tones used by your kid against you.

Yet despite that there will be days where you’d feel as if you’ve gone back to square one. Worry not…no matter how seductive the notion of linear progression might be, human evolution was not a story of a single file line but instead a complex expansion of a helix. There might be days where you take more time than others to adjust to the slow-moving changes.

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The good news is that you will assimilate changes with increasing rapidity. This internalisation process will create a positive dynamism where you shall gather pace in replacing your old behavioural patterns with fulfilling alternatives. When feeling emotional exposed and vulnerability you will take the minute to process your sentiments and thus counter the situation more deftly.

This tortoise-like refashioning of you will show especially to those around you. Further energising you. In all a profound sense of compassion and acceptance will make your interactions with others more meaningful, including your therapist.

Little by little it will dawn on you that you have agency in your problems, your stress, your anxiety, your relationships, your office, your career, your life. And that you can tap into the power of self, and exercise control over your decisions, wants, emotions and mind.

Observing all the changes in you will make your feel hopeful about your present and future. Having experienced the transformative power of therapy, you would want to help others encountering similar problems. You’ll contribute in group therapies more proactively or be enthused to volunteer in NGOs helping people in need. You’d want to give back to the community that helped you blossom and flourish.

Not only will you thrive, you will also touch the lives of others with joy.