Understanding your feelings is the key to discovering new possibilities.
Feelings provide us with invaluable information about ourselves, others, and our world.
From a psychological perspective, the ultimate challenge of life is to feel fully alive. Only you know how alive you really feel. You may feel fully alive or you may feel quite dead inside. You may just be going through the motions of living, more dead than alive, and not really enjoying life. Helping people feel fully alive is the ultimate goal of psychotherapy.
A significant reason why you may not feel fully alive is because you may be stuck in one or more negative emotional states, such as depression, anger, fear, shame, guilt, loneliness, self-hate, inferiority, jealousy, shyness, or confusion.
Feelings have histories. Troubling feelings that you experience have a unique meaning for you because of your unique family and life history.
Feelings are the language of personal meaning. By exploring the meaning of your feelings in the context of your unique developmental and relational history and most importantly, in the context of the therapeutic relationship, you will come to understand how you got stuck in these feelings and why you remain stuck.
As you come to understand the deeper meaning of your feelings, you will begin to understand yourself and your life in a way you’ve never understood them before. With this new self-awareness, fresh emotional horizons and possibilities will begin to open-up for you. You will see yourself, others, and the world in a new way which will free you from your old patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving and you will feel more alive.