I had one of those mornings recently where I woke up and my neck was in terrible pain. I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary or hurt myself, but suddenly I couldn’t turn or tilt my head with sharp pain stopping me in my tracks.
I couldn’t look over my shoulder without turning my whole upper body. I couldn’t put my head through a shirt without a stabbing sensation at the base of my skull. Something was seriously off.
This has happened before, so I have my familiar set of strategies I use to help it get better. Stretching, rolling, massage. But as the days wore on and the pain endured, I started thinking about how I was treating the physical issue like so many people treat their mental health issues.
“Sure it’s bad, but I can still get on with life…”
“Yes, it’s really restricting me, but…”
“I’m in pain, but I know how to live with this pain so…”
I was treating the pain as a symptom, but not addressing the causes. I had been trying to use body work to get the muscles to relax, but I wasn’t spending time figuring out what caused the issue in the first place.
What if this wasn’t about sleeping in a weird position for a single night, but it was a result of a number of factors throughout my life and lifestyle? How would I approach the pain differently if the goal wasn’t to simply reduce the acute pain of the moment, but instead to figure out why I ended up in so much pain in the first place, so that I could address the underlying causes and prevent the pain from getting so bad in the future?
If you’re wondering how depth therapy can help you, this is a metaphor that hits close to home.
When a therapist focuses on the surface level of the presenting issues (my neck hurts!), they may be able to offer assistance with reducing that immediate pain.
But in depth therapy we want to understand why you have that pain in the first place. We want to help you figure out the underlying causes of the current issue so that you can make changes on that deeper level in order to prevent that pain from coming back, a symptom-focused therapy will not get you there.
If you’d like to talk more about how depth therapy might help you to feel more calm, capable, and connected, I invite you to fill out my request form so we can have a brief, free call.