“The Alchemy of Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times" from Sounds True
“The Alchemy of Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times”
Source: Sounds True Podcast | Matt Licata, PhD (Listen 1 hr, 7 min)
Contributor: Selena Garcia
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“We’ve all been given experience in this life that we haven’t had either the internal resources or the sort of external support to integrate, to metabolize, to make use of.” - Matt Licata, PhD
No matter where you are in your own personal growth and healing, there's a lot to appreciate in this piece from Sounds True. If you'd simply like to learn more about healing, this is definitely for you. Matt Licata does a great job of explaining a topic that is so layered.
Many of us are aware there is wisdom to be found in difficult times and negative emotions, but the way to seize that wisdom is not always clear. Matt shares tools you can explore, and while there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, it's about trying things out and incorporating what works for you.
“Matt is a practicing psychotherapist whose work incorporates developmental, psychoanalytic, and depth psychologies, as well as a contemplative, meditative, and mindfulness-based approach to transformation and healing.”
Podcast description: “Tami Simon speaks with Matt about what it is to be a healing space, that is to hold space for ourselves and others, as well as how we can feel held by something greater than ourselves during challenging experiences. They also explore our inner wounds and self-abandonment, spiritual bypassing and the ways in which many practices allow us to gloss over the real healing needed, and how coming into an embodied state can open us to greater inner depths. Finally, Tami and Matt discuss becoming an alchemist of your own life, discovering the inner gold that each of us has within, and befriending all of ourselves.”
As you can tell from reading the description above, there is much more to this than sampled below. You'll learn more about how we're not wired to do this work by ourselves, and that perhaps, just maybe, our pain is the path.
Sounds True links to the full transcript, but I say give it a listen. There’s something to hearing one’s voice. Either way, Sounds True has you covered.
“The symptom is really a solution to an underlying vulnerability or a problem; that if we go back, all of our symptoms, as crazy as they might seem, are serving some sort of adaptive, intelligent, almost creative purpose.” - Matt Licata, PhD
(24:15) Tami: “What to you, Matt, is healing?
(24:35) Matt: “Yes, well, this is a deep one, Tami and I think that there are many layers of healing. There’s many kinds of healing. I think the way that I tend to speak of it to most people is—we’ve all been given experience in this life that we haven’t had either the internal resources or the sort of external support to integrate, to metabolize, to make use of. So, I think when that happens, and this is often one way that we talk about what trauma is, but what happens is when we have an experience or a series of experiences that we’re unable to integrate, what happens is, that experience gets set aside in a certain part of the brain over in the right limbic system and also in the circuitry of the body where it’s held. There’s actually a neurochemical that will send the memories and the experience into these parts of the brain and the body, where it’s held for healing.”
(25:41) Matt: “So, to me, healing would be being able to bring these new resources, which are lenses of perception… to, how can we begin to meet that material and provide those resources that weren’t available when we originally had those experiences?”
(27:35) Matt: “And so, that’s one way that I would talk about healing and that’s more of a neurobiological or emotional, that we have these symptoms that are very adaptive. These symptoms are—and I first learned this from Jung, was that the symptom is really a solution to an underlying vulnerability or a problem; that if we go back, all of our symptoms, as crazy as they might seem, are serving some sort of adaptive, intelligent, almost creative purpose. They’re these early forms of sort of self-compassion, you could say.”
(28:09) Matt: “That’s sort of one route in. There’s different, many different versions of what healing is. Healing could also be just working to reduce my symptoms so I can get through my day, so I don’t want to dismiss any different types of healing. But that’s the way I would at least begin a conversation about healing.”
(28:30) Tami: “In your own experience, when you think of a symptom that you worked with for a period of time, and then went through some type of process… a process that landed you in a very different place, and the symptom guided you there, what an example might be?”
(28:51) Matt: “Yes. So for whatever reason, I think what comes up for me is, what I’ve come to see in myself was this—for many, many years, this deep sort of resistance to really allowing another person, especially a new intimate partner, to sort of matter to me and how I would always sort of play on the outside and wouldn’t really let this person in. I wouldn’t share myself, even though on the outside consciously, I was claiming that what I really wanted was a very deep, emotionally satisfying, nurturing relationship, how I would inevitably sort of act in ways that would, in some ways, sabotage the possibility that that could ever happen.”
(29:41) Matt: “I was working with a therapist at the time and what I began to realize that there was so much sort of undigested and unmetabolized grief in myself that the schema or the mental model that was sort of running the show in the background was…”
You’ll have to check it directly for the rest. Happy healing.
LISTEN TO THE FULL PODCAST (1 hr, 7 min)
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