Much of contemporary mental health treatment will ask you to manage or conquer what troubles you, as if your symptoms were enemies holding hostage some pure self within you that still lives in a time before you were hurt. But what if there were no going back? What if your symptoms are a part of you, screaming in a language you don’t yet understand? Even now, when they feel foreign, vicious, and terrifying, they do not need to be erased. They need to be heard. 

Here, you will speak, and you will set the course. We may turn to your dreams, to moments from your past, to fantasies, to stray memories that return without warning, or to thoughts that seem to arrive from somewhere beyond your intention. You may bungle your words, find yourself on a tangent, or even  hear yourself say something you did not plan to say at all. While you may be used to ignoring these supposed lapses, it is precisely within them that our work begins.

If smoothing things over no longer satisfies, and if the old solutions have worn thin, I invite you to follow what stirs beneath your words. There is a way forward. It may not be the way you imagined, but it is the one that belongs to you.