After therapy I always emerge with a renewed intention to keep the focus on myself and not worry about other people, what they do, what they think, how they react or communicate. Narrowing the sphere of influence, so to speak.

My current challenge is to build up  my higher self and sense of empowerment so that I can overcome the negative critic in me, which causes all kinds of emotions to engulf my being. Tied in with this is to always be aware of the ego states I’m adopting in any situation and what kind of communication patterns I set up with other people.

My therapist tells me everything can be overcome with work and practise. It just leads me to wonder how much of who we are comes from nature and how much from nurture. How many times have we heard people say character is inherent. It’s the way we are born. But more and more I’m learning that the answer lies in the way we were brought up and nurtured. There are reasons why I’m afraid of authority figures, why I hate conflict, why I build walls around myself, why I have the belief systems I do. They can all be traced back to roots.

Once again the journey of self discovery is so very interesting.

One of the main reasons I decided to seek professional guidance was that I wanted to make the changes in my life stick, but I found that I didn’t have the proper tools to do it. Self reflection is one thing, you know where you’ve gone wrong and you know what you’d like to change. But what happens next? I found that I was veering toward painful self-flagellation and had difficulty detaching myself from the past. So I decided to try some form of therapy. I’m very fortunate to have found a counsellor I feel comfortable opening up to and she provides a very real sense of safety that I have rarely felt before. I went in knowing pretty much what kind of goals I wanted to achieve in the long term and she has mapped out our sessions based on these objectives.

In today’s session, we started to delve into how I relate to people and how they perceive me, in other words, communication. It all begins with self-awareness. I did a questionnaire to determine my dominant ego state. This is a theory called transactional analysis, developed by Eric Berne, who basically posited that everyone has a little bit of the parent ego, adult ego and child ego states in them ie behaviours, thoughts and feelings we learn from our parents, from when we were children and what we feel in the here and now as adults.

Tellingly, I scored extremely low on the Free Child component, which represents spontaneity, creativity, enjoyment and all that good stuff. In contrast my Compliant Child component was very high — submissive, overly adaptable, anxious, inwardly rebellious. In terms of communication, negative components such as compliant child often invite negative responses while positive components will invite positive responses. Much of who we are today comes about because of the way we view ourselves, but the way we view ourselves is influenced greatly by our prior experiences and the type of nurturing our parents and significant care givers provided us when we were young. But my therapist was quick to stress that there’s no wrong or right, it’s just the way we are. It was very interesting to look at my other ego states and how much they occupy relative to each other.

So today I learnt that while there are things I need to work on, breaking it down so methodically helps me deal with the fear that it cannot be done successfully.

In today’s session we talked about cognitive theory and the ABC diagram — antecedent, behaviour and consequence. The aim was to help me identify what my primary trigger was and what my coping mechanisms were and they’re basically fear and flight. Very enlightening, and I felt so drained after. Drained and hungry.