People come to therapy because something is going wrong, but those who stay are staying because something is going right.
We don’t just want the thoughts about death, suicide, dystopia to stop. We also want to feel happy, connected, and purposeful.
That’s what this section is about. While it might be kind of idealistic, it’s necessary for us to have an idea of what we’re striving for.
Happiness
What does it mean to be happy? Many of us are seeking an answer to this question though we might be hesitant to admit it. We look for happiness in different jobs, communities, and relationships, and the whole time we’re not quite sure what we’re looking for.
I have an imprecise answer for you.
Happiness arises out of the foundations of feelings of safety, security, openness, connection, and being present.
Okay so what does THAT mean?
Essentially it means that happiness is not isolated. Happiness comes as a result of us having some basic needs met, of soothing our nervous system, not being too stressed, being open and curious about the world around us, feeling connected to people in our lives, and having a sense of purpose.
This might sound overwhelming, but when we break it down like this we can cultivate all these component parts.
Community
What’s in a name? Come Together Counseling, that’s what I named this therapy practice years ago. I wanted to center coming together as the core element of the healing process.
Coming together in relationships, that is.
Our society teaches us to search for our prosperity, our meaning, our healing, as individuals. And that never really works out because all of these things come through our relationships with other people.
We need community just as much as we need food, water, shelter.
When we come into therapy we are often feeling disconnected from community. That’s nothing to be ashamed of! In building community we’re swimming upstream so to speak, pushing against prevailing cultural norms and practices.
And just to be clear what I mean by community, I’m talking about people who know each others’ names. Maybe they see each other somewhat regularly for a recurring activity.
This is often a cornerstone of my work with folks, the work of building community. It can be slow but makes a huge difference.
Utopia
On the Money page we spoke about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how it’s inherently flawed in that it’s individualistic. He got this idea from the Blackfoot Nation and their breath of life theory.
What you might immediately notice about this theory is that it’s more well rounded in naming different needs we have. It’s building towards community actualization, and not just self actualization.
Why is this important? Well, I believe that by naming what we need we can strive toward that. We might not ever perfectly achieve what we set out to do, but our efforts will allow us to get closer and closer.
Utopia represents this striving. We are unlikely to experience a large scale utopia anytime soon, however we can do what we can to make our corner of the world a little more utopian. And in so doing, we meet our own relational needs.