Healing at your house: your emotional environment will relocate with everywhere you go

Therapy is expensive to the degree that you do not follow through with the intervention or have anyone at home who wants you healed.

On the average, sessions range from 45 minutes to 2 hours weekly. This leaves you with 166 hours every week to undo your therapy session. On your healing journey, the environment you return to is more influential than your therapist.

Whilst you cannot hasten your journey because it is a process, empirically, you can go in circles and think you are progressing. You are in circles when you return to the lifestyle that caused your chaos.

Whatever got you into therapy is likely not new — you tend to recall it more quickly and return to it almost naturally. Why? That behaviour or activity has created its neural pathway to help you achieve results.

This can be as tiny as watching funny videos instead of confronting why you feel sad or as big as any addiction that is ruining your life right now.

Naturally, behaviours or patterns change faster with sudden emotional interruptions as they serve as motivation. However, walking into therapy might not be an emotional interruption for most people. So, they feel like the mess is still an option.

If social services take your children away because you have been drinking since you lost your romantic partner, that is an emotional interruption.

The pain of losing your kids and the horror they could go through being passed from family to family can create a shock effect to make you turn your life around quickly because you have to choose between grieving one person and grieving everyone.

On the flip side, if you had no children and it was just you grieving a partner, you will require more discipline because you might not get any emotional interruptions that will give your mind perspective. This is where personal integrity comes in:

1. Will you improve your life even if the way it is right now works?
2. Will you quit your addiction even if it is destroying nothing yet?
3. Will you get out of an abusive environment even if the abuse is minor?
4. Will you build solid relationships now that you are not lonely?
5. Will you create accountability guardrails now that you have discipline?

When you go for therapy, understand that the environment you return to is a huge determiner of whether you heal in six or sixteen months.

Your environment is physical but incredibly emotional as well.

Your physical environment: your geographical environment and its observable culture, norms, and value systems. If your physical environment does not agree with your healing journey, a change of environment is possible.

Conversely, your emotional environment will relocate with you everywhere you go.

Think of your emotional environment as a collective of every interaction, opinion, belief, perspective or expectation you hold that guides your life and is strengthened by your relationships and the rewards you receive.

Your emotional environment is your house — where you process whatever new information you want to act on. This is where you make a resolve to elevate yourself regardless of the physical environment or you decide to be in the mud because everyone else is in the mud.

Signs of an unhealthy emotional environment

If you have been in therapy but cannot see results, this might be where your problem lies.

Trauma Bonds

These are relationships that exist and are sustained only based on shared trauma.

Every good relationship lasts through the hard and the good times, but when a relationship only wants to stay in the hard times, there is a problem. At first, it might not be evident. Nevertheless, carefully reviewing the conversation content will show you the facts.

I am very supportive of communities built to help victims survive a specific trauma or addiction. Yet, I am significantly concerned when that is the only community one has for an extended period — you need to meet someone not dealing with your type of chaos to understand what you are searching for.

A trauma bond can easily be identified by the following:

1. The trauma (pain and results) is all the group ever talks about
2. Trauma is the only basis the friend group recruits, though they are not a trauma recovery organization.
3. People who do not have that type of trauma are shamed by the group and mocked for not knowing how hard life can be
4. Any attempt to move towards healing is met with disapproval and talks of living with what you have.
5. Consolation is derived from knowing people are living through worse than the members.
6. Members would rather spend more finances on temporary fixes than on a long-term solution
7. Members retain addictions as a coping mechanism that is normalized within the friendship circle
8. Members are possessive when anyone in the circle begins to interact with people they consider outside their league
9. Members are loyal to each other’s addictions and do not hold each other accountable for healing.

Trauma bonds can happen among members of the same family where what connects them is not just blood but shared trauma they have built their lives around.

Good note: if people in trauma-bond-style relationships choose individual healing, the fierce loyalty built over time can evolve into a beautiful relationship but someone has to be willing to power through the group’s disapproval and not look back if the group never changes its stance.

Self-Loathing

This happens when a person disapproves of themselves because their quality of life is not the expected ideal.

We all have a life we live and an ideal life in our imagination. The discrepancy between those two lives is where we wear masks. Masks are what we project when we are with other people because we believe that is the version of us they will respect and accept.

Carl Jung talks about the sides of us we do not like and repress as our shadow-self.

So, there is you (your whole self), your shadow self (the parts of you that you repress and hide because it is likely not the ideal you want) and your masks (the version of you that is for public consumption).

This dissonance within yourself significantly increases as you pick up more masks — this is where self-loathing lives.

Self-loathing makes your therapy fail sometimes because you could be using therapy as a mask.

This plays out as you shame yourself for not getting your life together. So, even when you go to therapy, you are returning to your self-sabotaging patterns so that your therapy fails. You subconsciously look forward to failure as it is your opportunity to remind yourself how unworthy you are.

This is multilayered for most people. Therefore, I will not attempt to write this like a diagnosis (only your professional therapist should diagnose you in a session).

Here are a few ways to identify self-loathing:

1. You hate yourself and you verbalize it
2. You have friends who obviously hate you but you all share a trauma bond so you stick with them
3. You are constantly doing things to make people hate you
4. Happy people make you feel like they have something to hide (because you have something to hide)
5. You have no fulfilment in your life outside of what happens in public light
6. You hate to spend time with yourself
7. You feel unworthy of good people in any relational capacity
8. You crave and chase people and things that make you suffer — the difficulty of the pursuit gives you a sense of purpose.
9. You fear being invisible and being forgotten so you are always under pressure to do something worthy of memory
10. You are likely to sabotage good relationships because you are afraid of being discovered as a fraud (you might not be one but you do not see yourself enough).

Making therapy work for you

1. Understand that your therapist is supposed to help you figure out the problem — resist the urge to be uncomfortable because you are not the expert.
2. Your emotional environment not working is a huge reason you got in therapy in the first place — be willing to confront what is out of place there
3. Be truthful and vulnerable with your therapist — they cannot mock you for your failures and neither are they permitted to talk to anyone else about it.
4. Follow through with your intervention plan
5. Build healthy relationships outside of therapy — your therapist is not your friend even though they are friendly.
6. If a therapist is not working for you, quit being their client and go elsewhere instead of quitting on your healing journey.