First and foremost, “therapy” implies “treatment” for “illness.” So the assumption is already made from a quasi-medical position that you are injured or damaged in some fashion.

Secondly, most forms of traditional work focus on what you do not want– what you want to stop doing or having; or getting a significant other to eliminate from his or her behavioral repertoire.

Thirdly, in consideration of what you don’t want, what’s typically addressed is the past or more distinctively, one’s recollection of times gone by; those which no longer exists. And since what we think of as the past can only be a personal recall of time and space that is no more, the “past” as an entity apart from one’s recall, is that which never was.

Many traditional treatments become forays into unwanted behaviors and feelings that led here. It’s the historical retelling of a tale that’s never been, and yet haunts the teller nonetheless.

The classic myth of this genre comes from Shelly sharing her “Frankenstein” with the world…a creation of the past to haunt the future…a resurrection of the dead, brought back to life to take the life of the maker (Dr. Frankenstein) playing G-d and paying for his hubris. Remember, if you must, the fire that kills the beast…burning what never was and should not have been to free it from itself…leaving only the smoke-stained remnants of an abomination created to look human.

This is the source of “terror” some speak of… the terror of clearing the recalled past of its shadows.  This  is also the form that rises again and again in many treatment modalities: To know oneself is to know ones past-or better yet, to reinvent a past worth having. Yet the basis these all begin from is what you most don’t want to be true of you, so that you can somehow leap to what you could become.  “Let’s get to that which causes you the most pain; that makes you want to hide from yourself.”  “Let’s peel back the ‘layers’ and see behind the ‘mask.”  Or more commonly, “Think of a problem you don’t want to have…or the person you don’t want to be.”

The problem with living inside the “problem state” lies in pointing to a past that’s hard to claim has ever really been. Since only the present exists, when it comes to the past, there is nothing there but what has been left behind– our recollections of what was as we continue to uncover what we thought was true so we can better “know ourselves”; “free ourselves.” Through this format, the best we can hope for is to overcome “problems”; to place our attention on the things we do not want to be there.

In contrast, there is another path that will lead you to know and achieve what you truly desire.