We all have a private world inside us. It is entirely unique. We know much more about our own private world than anyone else does, but even we don’t know it fully. There are depths we will never reach. Parts of us we will never completely know or understand.
Our private world contains all of the experiences we have ever had, and our reactions to them – our excitements, loneliness, joy, shocks, frustrations, contentment, confusion, boredom, confidence, terror, shame, disappointment.
Our private world contains our own ideas about who we are and the story of our life, including expectations of how our future will play out. It contains all of our dreams, longings and fears, and also all of our ‘rules’ about how we should live and who we ought to be. It also contains our moment by moment feeling, thinking and awareness.
We hold all of this – our experiences, beliefs, thoughts and feelings – not only in our minds but also in our bodies; in the way we move and hold ourselves, in our tensions and knots, in the way we breathe. We embody our life experience.
And all of this combined shapes the way we act and the choices we make.
If we’re not aware of what is driving our actions then we might find ourselves in situations or ways of being that don’t make us happy.
The process of therapy helps us to get to know our inner world with more clarity, so that we can understand both the needs and dreams we might not have dared to be fully conscious of and also the beliefs and fears that we have allowed to hold us back.
Then we can choose our next steps in life more consciously.