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I used to be the “tough love” therapist. I believed confronting people with the “truth” would be an emotional jolt that could facilitate change.

And sometimes it worked. Whenever I met with clients who were intellectualisers like me, being presented with a new “theory” or idea offered a “high”. New and novel perspectives can feel powerful.

People love Aha! moments.

The problem is therapy can sometimes be so committed to the Aha! moment that it forgets its real purpose: facilitating genuine embodiment. Helping people become active participants in their lives by feeling themselves and their experiences fully gets sidelined by searching for root causes and connections.

Often, we use intellectualising as a way to avoid participation and embodiment. Intellectualising keeps us at a safe distance from our bodies. And we can spend years in therapy talking about change, but never facilitating it or feeling safe within it.

And that is because, for many people who have been traumatized and rely on masks to feel safe, change can genuinely feel unsafe.

It’s stripping off the armour and then waltzing into battle. It’s not actually a wise strategy. We need something else to take the place of the armour, so then we can actively and intentionally participate in what we are fighting so hard for (such as our wellbeing, our recovery, our joy, our relationships, our self-worth and so forth).

I know I spent almost a decade in therapy searching for the “epiphany” that would “cure” me. If I could just find the most powerful “Aha!” moment, then I wouldn’t actually need to feel or do any work that felt terrifying or dangerous. The epiphany itself was a proxy for the transformation. I figured, “Now that I know the what and why of a feeling, I didn’t have to feel it.” That feeling was “taken care of”. Next!

So it will come as no shock to you that 10 years on I was still struggling with the same stuff…but just much, much smarter and more self-aware. Which can become a bit of a cycle; now that I’m so much more aware, I invite myself to go deeper and deeper. And see more gaps and holes and disconnections that I should interrogate.

It’s as if I used therapy to maintain my mask.

The problem is, of course, that my therapists did not know I was masked. Because my mask was fully embedded into the fabric of my skin, life, mind, thoughts, and personality.

And it needed to be. Because removing that mask meant catapulting me back to my most vulnerable moments. Maybe I was just a pile of traumas wrapped in a trenchcoat. So please, don’t you dare remove my trenchcoat – it is the only thing holding me together as a coherent person!

I remember going to a yoga class once and the instructor said “Don’t push through the pain”. I was so confused. Wait…but isn’t that how to move forward? If I don’t push through the pain I won’t get to the other side!

But in reality, pushing through the pain just damages you. How can I possibly transform my life from that place?

The gentle place – where the pain starts – is your cue to stop. I’m not suggesting avoiding pain: Trauma work and unmasking are obviously uncomfortable. But I think we tell people that minor discomfort won’t get us anywhere. Minor discomfort, minor results. Big discomfort, big results. And it’s just not true.

When we suggest that only big pain is effective, we skew what pain and discomfort feel like. We start to tell ourselves big pain and fear are mere “discomforts” that we need to subject ourselves to and push past in order to “heal”, “recover” or “grow”.

All that does is minimize (and gaslight) how much we are re-triggering and re-traumatizing ourselves. Pain isn’t discomfort. It is painful. Like when lifting weights, pain isn’t where growth happens, it’s where we cause damage and need even more time to recover. Just the same as learning doesn’t happen in the panic zone!

Intellectualizing was my protective guard against being thrown into pain. But it kept me from needed discomfort too.

It enabled me to approximate transformation and movement and growth while protecting me from the terrors of transformation and change.

The Values Integration Process taught me that transformation doesn’t need to be painful.

I don’t need to have feelings at peak intensity right off the bat. In fact, I shouldn’t start my journey of ‘feeling things in my body’ from a point of pain, shame and fear. My body will never agree to that. It will pull the trenchcoat tighter.

But what if I said we could start feeling things from a place of joy and aliveness and strength, competency, agency, and power? Well…I may just untie that trenchcoat a little…

When we move too fast with clients, or as a client if we feel we are being pulled too fast through the rapids, we need to slow down. The values process isn’t about hitting all the steps in record time. In fact, the most valuable thing about the process is that so much transformation can happen even before you finish telling your fully alive stories.

When I went through the training and was practicing, I distinctly remember a moment when I was exploring one of my messages and I didn’t realise how deep the message went. I accidentally dove into the rapids when I meant to just dip my toe in the stream. It happens.

I told our instructor (the creator of the VBI process, Heather Morgan) I didn’t want to explore that message yet because “exploring it meant I would have to blow up my life and I wasn’t ready to make all the changes that this new message would tell me to make.”

I still assumed that if I forced myself to know the truth of something, that would be enough to catapult me forward. I forgot that I still have immense choice in how I decide to proceed. And, importantly, that the purpose of the new message wasn’t in any way to tell us what to do, but rather to offer us a better sanctuary in our minds, bodies, and hearts with regard to a specific issue.

She assured me that when we re-wrote the message, that transformation would be gentle. And even if some big things did change, they changed in the direction of wholeness and fullness and that is such a freeing, non-painful place to be.

Sometimes our biggest pain and strain is simply when we are forcing ourselves to make something work that isn’t working. Removing the emotional splinter feels scary, but it feels oh-so-good to have it gone. We forget that transformation is liberation.

We step away from something or someone or some way of thinking and we also step away from the emotional barnacles and leeches that were clinging to us, along for the ride. We shed a layer and that layer was weighing us down. Ahhhh it feels so nice.

But there’s another piece to this: The values process isn’t about shaming or blaming the mask. There is no judgment toward the limiting message because each message is there to protect us, to solve a particular problem for us.

Like Marie Kondo’s method (KonMari), we don’t discard anything with disdain. We thank it for its service. Thank you, mask, for caring so much about me that you did everything you could to protect me from harm.

Creating New Safe Spaces

So much of my therapy training was, in retrospect, kind of like preparing people for pain and agony. While we used phrases like “let’s create a safe container and safe space” it was also a veiled way of saying “Get ready, this next part is going to suck”. It’s no wonder I moved into coaching where the focus is more on moving forward instead of evaluating the past. (Disclaimer: this is a broad generalization and not all therapy or coaching practices fall into these narrow categories). The psychoanalytic tradition of self-evaluation, however, remains pervasive. Even now, I have sessions where I worry, “If they didn’t sob in front of me, did I even do my job?”

Luckily, I adapted my “tough love” approach very early on and only have a few sessions that I rightfully cringe about. Now, I have an even better understanding of just how much our masks are woven into the fabric of our bodies, minds and souls. And that trying to unmask a client is like ripping off a limb. We cannot unmask clients. That is not our job. Further, we cannot pretend there is safety in feeling immensely distressed. Instead, we can create gentle guard rails for them to explore their own choices and transformations, taking only the steps that they are ready and excited for. The ones where they see their capacity and success and are eager to move in that direction.

Where can removing your mask – just for a second – spark joy? Let’s go there.