When your attention on another is undivided, you become attractive to them because they can tell you are tracking their expression. This encourages them to press out more & more. No person wants to be the branch that falls to the forest floor when there's no one to hear it. A person is a social construct, meaning they exist & grow only if they're visible & validated by other pillars of the same building; by another representative of the collective species who has the infrastructure to relate & discern. Seeing someone with your heart gives them the bravery to expose their personality, & in this process of exposition, the opportunity for the grounding nature of attention to reach their psychological plane is accessed.
At this stage, the goal of catharsis is only a matter of time until it's inevitable release happens that has the power to purify the entire system back to its original nature of health. Ultimately, a therapist is an outsourcing of mindfulness for those who haven't established the balance yet to do it on their own. To listen to someone is to be devoid of all self expression so you can invite them in the supreme plane of conscioussness where all things align. Even if the initial expression of the other appears nonsensical, if you let them speak long enough, the influence of conscioussness will eventually reveal the patterns of thought & emotion. The only task of the therapist is to draw out the elements of a person's mind through the higher faculty of reasonable curiosity so a map can surface. Because it's a logical generation, it must be illustrated across time so unwavering patience is an absolute neccesity. Once the psychological landscape is exposed, which can take minutes, days, weeks, or months, depending on the web of the patient, the clear identification of problems & their solutions can be discovered to create a permanent transformation towards health. The mark of a profound healer isn't reoccuring visitors, but new ones because those from the past have graduated to living their life, not being troubled by it. The only time one should return, ideally, is as equals on the same balanced footing of wisdom.
The danger of deep therapuetic work from the practioners perspective is if they become too impressed by the emotion & intellect of the patient due to not accessing enough stillness within themself first. This is important to understand because stillness allows for the discernment & release of all things. If illustrations are clung to, this will create inertia in the mind of the therapist & will create all kinds of disease across time. Of course, empathy is valuable, but to become overly invested in the patient's story to the point where the therapist loses their footing in the current instead of sitting calmly by the bank of the river, is to become like the person they are seeking to help heal when it should be the other way around. For the process to work, there must be a transference of order, not of disorder. The healer's stillness must be in greater magnitude than the patient's energy for transformation to happen without damaging effects on either. This is an incredibly difficult position in society to fulfill that takes years of spiritual & psychological fortification which is why most don't do it. But for those who have learned the art, sacrificing their own illusions to reach balance with the universe that protects them from psychological imbalance, their presence is truly a timeless gift to those who respect their work.
So therapy is less about the grasp of intellectual concepts, & far more about accessing the innate restoration ability within us. At the surface, it's a matter of thought, but truthfully it's a matter of life: of a magical force we cannot know with theories though we can be intimately involved with it through attention. Many things we do on a daily basis are magical without us considering them to be so: the growth of hair overnight, the burst of laughter in response to jokes, the knowing you need to drink water, even the opening & closing of your hand, are all spontaneous beyond intellectual understanding. & yet, their simplicity pervades our lives more than scriptures ever could. Such is the same for the therapist who after careful listening speaks their ephiphany to their patient who erupts into purging tears of relief or halts their frantic expression to abide in a moment of quiet refelction they haven't done in years. It appears to be person to person but it is just life to life. So the one who knows themself knows all others because we share a core, & can therefore heal anyone who opens to their boundless oasis even after they trekked through a finite desert.
The only way I have a holistic understanding of mental health is because over the course of several years, I went through the painful & joyful process of tearing my mind apart & putting it back together & watched the whole thing so I know how it works. It sounds insane, I know. But the universe built me with the desire, boldness, & willpower to chart this psychic terrain in its fullness. It's like software. & although very advanced, it's mechanics can be understood by the one who turns themself into both the patient & the therapist as I did. When you take accountability for your own mind, unless it's been physically impaired, you can clearly see that your own, & everyone elses mental disease isn't something that just happens to us out of thin air. It's something that was created & can therefore be corrected. Psychological illness is a misuse of creativity rooted in a false identity that generates compulsively rather than the actual identity that generates consciously. From a rushed splatter painting, to a careful mosaic, you can learn to design a mind yourself & others can enjoy so long as you hold your brush steady. & I can aid you to develop this even hand.
