In the lengthy quote I posted yesterday, they commented that what your mother does not mirror, becomes difficult for you to express in yourself. What you are wanting is the feeling of being comforted, protected, nurtured, recognized as individual, rewarded for initiative and learning. The process of growth for the wounded is remembering it is still possible to feel what they feel. It is not too late. There is a layer of muck and habit, but feelings never disappear, nor does the possibility of feelings, except of course in cases of gross organic defects, which do not afflict most of us.
Thus, when you are feeling what you feel, when you are undergoing conscious interoception as a growth process, you are self parenting. You are doing for yourself–I am doing for myself–what my mother failed to do.
And it seems to me that trying to do this in a clinical setting is almost inherently problematic and unhealthy. The idea is that as a physiologically mature adult you enter into a different relationship with your parent using the therapist as a substitute, and that you do this without touch, without constant contact, without leaving, at the end of the day, the relationship as other than pay for service. This seems absurd to me. Parents don’t charge by the hour, and they are not forbidden from touching you, or at least forced to undergo lengthy classes on the ethics of touch.
And the therapist IS NOT YOUR PARENT. I can’t see how it could even be healthy on their side either. Personally, I have regressed in therapy, but there was nothing the therapist could really do with it. It was needed–I had to know this was there, in order to deal with it intelligently–but it would be easy to spend a small fortune and be barely better, even with a good, well trained, sincere therapist.
To my mind, quiet interoception is the only way forward. This is the essence of Kum Nye. And what is interesting about Kum Nye relative to similar practices presented by trauma therapists, is that it explicitly incorporates both physical nervous energy, and more subtle, spiritual energy. The two are clearly related.
I visualize it as a series of locks you coax into opening, to allow new energies to flow.
Actually, I would add that group celebrations of all sorts are likely useful as well. In America, we don’t celebrate very well. At least white Americans. Large groups dancing, drumming, singing: all that is very healing.