ALL ROADS LEAD BACK TO YOU

There are few things I like talking about more than about reducing stress through the narrative discourse using the first person viewpoint, first, because of the results second, because, once a client has done it, it is almost like starting to write on a clean slate. I would say that doing this work is "a return to life". It is a wonderful way to clean up the past and reach levels of joy and fulfilment never reached before. 

Let us say that I have a philosophy for doing the work I do and the way I do it.

To let you in on what it is, I invite you, my reader, to postulate that, at a certain level, all behaviors serve a positive intention.

As an example, an aggressive behavior or a lie might serve as a protection. The positive intention behind feeling fear is usually a need for security. Even the resistance to change can serve different positive intention, such as to honour or to protect oneself.

Let's now look at psychosomatic disorders or an authenticated medical condition or issue. Let's look at fatigue: maybe, the fatigue alerts the person to her need to stop, rest and relax. And how about migraine: it might alert the person to the major stresses of her life indicating a need for major changes, or again, it might be to signal her powerlessness in the face of relational problems, indicating a need to clear things up.

I can only imagine, because, for each person in therapy, such a symptom might uncover a totally different positive intention.

Then again, we have to speak of secondary benefits: I remember a mother sharing that whenever she had to make a business travel, her daughter would get sick. The separation syndrome, here, signaled that the child was distressed by the coming absence of her mother. Had the mother cancelled her plans, the child would have learned the benefits of being sick. No child consciously wants to be sick, but if there is a result in being sick, it might be used over and over again. It is not even consciously dictated by the child; once used with some degree of success, it can become an automatic response.

The tunnel therapy or emotional life story gives the individual the comprehension of her own positive intentions behind unadapted behaviors, health issues or other demands for changes, therefore paving the way to choosing new behaviors and changes that will last once the real positive intention is uncovered.

One of the first principles my work adheres to in the therapeutic setting is to respond to a demand for change by examining all positive intentions discovered with a lot of respect because if a positive intention is not satisfied due to a conflicting inner agenda, changes might not last. As a therapist, I want to do the work well only once.

Here is an example taken from one of my clients. Maybe, some people will recognize themselves here. A mother came to see me to change her prompt to severely hit her children when she perceived that they had misbehaved. To her surprise, when we did the necessary inner work, she discovered that "it was her way to show them her love". The "hitting" actually provided a connection, which reminded me of the "theory of chaos". No one will be surprised to find out, this mother had gotten her fair share of "hitting" in her youth and that her family was tightly knit.

Once we uncovered this positive intention, it was easy to replace this behavior with a more "appropriate and socially acceptable" behavior and it has proven to give long-lasting results. She has now adopted two young children and claims she could not have done that before as she didn't trust herself around children.

You know as well as I do, that, it is not because someone wants to change that he is capable of effecting the change. There are many unknown benefits to keep a behavior going and there are many unclear motivations to change it. But if you can find its underlying program (its real one, not one you suspect only), it is easier to work on the "positive intention" while changing the behavior. That will work for anything that requires a new decision or a change of behavior.

Message from Lorraine Loranger

Our fast-moving modern lives prevent us from following our natural rhythm. Based on hyperactivity, competition, and will, we hold in contempt our fatigue and stress. As we go beyond, producing efforts upon efforts, we buck up, we hang on, we persist and end up...exhausted.

Let us say that I have a philosophy for doing the work I do and the way I do it. Accounts of significant events in the life of the narrator have a plot, which is less often chronological and more often arranged according to a principle determined by the nature of the help the person needs. It is non-conventional: narration in the sense that it is used here deals with description, time, as well as context. 

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