I found this in one of my many small notebooks, dated 12/21/01, and thought I would share it here: 

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We're looking for a cure for things that have no words

 Many therapy-averse people I have met explain their disdain for therapy in this way: Why should I do digging around in the past? What's the point? How is that going to help me? 

There is a trapdoor in therapy, one in which the patient can become so involved in the past that she believes that restitution and healing must occur there; losing sight of the reality that the past can never be changed, rescued, or healed. There may be an outer understanding of this 'present' fact, and yet the affiliation and loyalty to the past can become so large, it can totally envelop the person. She falls into the past.

Now, of course, you could say that this was the original problem for which she comes to therapy--responding to  a troubled past instead of being free to live in the present. Yet, it's different now because now the response is conscious, more elaborate and more powerfully compelling. It feels like this: If I only could go back there and fix this. I must go back there and fix this. There is no other way for me to heal.  It truly becomes an obsession. 

At this stage, the therapist must be willing to confront the patient. The patient will be in shock of course--she currently thinks the therapist  exists in her past and can go there with here for the express purpose of supporting her as she does her work there.  I say this to therapists: You too may have been drawn into her magical thinking. Be brave. Only by refusing to live in  her past with her can you provide some small incentive for her to shoulder the real task of therapy: to heal the present and take responsibility for her own choices. 

Being with the therapist in the room where the therapy is taking place must itself become a more compelling reality, a more attractive option, a more powerful defense, than returning over and over again to the past. 

During my many years of therapy, I was continually wary of falling into a predictable stage in which I would become so self-involved as to be loathsome not just to others, but to myself. I didn't know then, of course, that it was OK for me to take my own needs at least as seriously as I take the needs of others. I vowed that I would stop therapy instantly if I started to see these traits in myself--complaining, self-involvement, entitlement, over-sensitivity, humorless assertiveness.

Thankfully, when I arrived at just that very stage, I had a hunch that it was just a stage, and furthermore, I was far too involved in the process at that point to stop. But I did find that there really is this particularly dangerous trapdoor in therapy--and it is exactly what my therapy averse friends warned me about--living in the past, blaming the past, responding to the present as if it were the past. 

I would say to anyone considering therapy that if you can bypass the past and learn to live in the present--by all means do so. There is absolutely nothing that can be accomplished in the past and virtually nothing that cannot be healed in the present. 

Yet most of us live in the past and need to revisit the past for months or years in therapy before we develop the legs we need to walk into the present and place our hopes and dreams solidly in the future, if not entirely in the present.

Sadly, many of us are still hoping to change the past.