Copyright 2012

One of the things I love about summer is that the pace of life slows down. There are more opportunities for recreation and leisure. It just feels right to sit on the porch in the evening, as if that counts as an activity. There is a little more room to breathe. I think summer is a good time for therapy. There is room in this season to sit back and reflect.

Therapy is an opportunity to get a small time-out from regular life. It can be the pause button in an otherwise hectic schedule. Maybe it is not as fun as a relaxed summer vacation, but it can function as a little oasis for the self. We all need some time and emotional distance to survey our life. We benefit from having some time to see ourselves as reflected by another person. There is so much we gain from stepping back and looking at our lives from a new vantage point.

The ways in which therapy provides this space for a new perspective is something I’m appreciating more and more. I know it is not concrete. It is also a hard selling point, I suppose. But the beauty (and success) is in the collaboration of client and therapist in the space to re-frame, rediscover, and revisit aspects of the self that feel static and unchangeable. There is so much we take as fact about ourselves until we have the right environment to begin to see possibilities we did not before.

I hope you will consider ways to take a step back in your life. It certainly does not have to be in the therapy office. A vacation, a new experience, a deeply connected conversation are just some other examples that provide us with a little distance for a new view of ourselves.

How can you take a step back and learn something new about yourself?