When we begin therapy, the initial focus is often on the conscious reasons behind our struggles—the triggers we can easily identify. These might include the way a parent treated us, a relationship that went wrong, or something within ourselves we feel bad about or are trying to prove. Understanding these conscious triggers is crucial and serves as a critical first step in the healing process.
However, addressing these conscious issues doesn’t always fully resolve our symptoms or struggles. Sometimes, clients return to therapy after having previously worked through significant issues, such as a difficult relationship with a critical father, a cold or dismissive mother, or feelings of insecurity from childhood. They may have done substantial work on self-esteem, trauma processing, or developing healthier relationship patterns. Yet, something can still trigger old feelings of anxiety, distress, or depression, leading them back to therapy. In these situations, I explore which issues were identified and worked through in their previous therapy sessions and what has led them to seek a new therapist at this time.
Dissociation and repression are psychological mechanisms that protect us from pain. When something is too difficult to confront, we may push it out of our conscious awareness. Over time, these repressed aspects—our memories, interactions with authority figures, or unresolved experiences—can subtly influence us in ways that are hard to identify. These hidden factors are often the keys to deeper layers of healing if we can be helped to uncover, know, and confront them.
For example, we might have memories of a parent who, while loving in many ways, also had flaws we found difficult to reconcile. These flaws may have been buried or overlooked in our narrative because they conflict with our idealized image of that parent. If one parent was hurtful, mean, or neglectful, and the other was mostly kind, we may struggle to acknowledge times when the “good” parent was also hurtful or failed to protect us. Addressing this in therapy can feel particularly threatening, leading us to gloss over those memories.
Similarly, we might disown parts of ourselves—like anger, aggression, or ambition—that don’t align with how we want to see ourselves. This can make us defensive or fearful when it comes to acknowledging feelings of anger towards our children, resentment towards someone in need, or shame over our desires to show off. We often avoid these truths because they challenge our sense of identity. Moreover, we may have processed traumas intellectually without fully accessing the emotions associated with them.
It’s hard to face these things alone. We often see them through the eyes of our childhood selves, conflating them with contexts that no longer apply. For example, occasionally getting angry as a parent isn’t the same as being a consistently mean parent. Setting boundaries with a child who is pushing limits isn’t necessarily subjecting them to the same feelings of rejection we might have felt as a sensitive child facing strict limits. Discussing a trauma in detail is much more painful than merely acknowledging that it happened. We need someone by our side—someone who can witness with compassion, give us perspective, and offer soothing and comfort in the therapeutic relationship.
Deep healing in therapy often occurs when we lean into these “hard to look at” aspects of ourselves and our experiences in a safe space. This challenging process requires us to confront parts of ourselves or our histories that we’ve avoided, minimized, or rejected. By bringing these hidden aspects into the light, we can begin to understand the full picture of who we are. We see how these unknown, split off, or unformulated parts of us have influenced our behavior, relationships, and emotions. Through this understanding, we can start to integrate these parts, making peace with them and allowing them to find a healthy place in our lives. This process also allows us to develop more compassionate and nuanced views of those who may have hurt us.
True healing in therapy involves embracing the entirety of who we are—both the parts we like and the parts we’ve tried to hide. It’s about recognizing that every aspect of ourselves has a role to play and that by integrating these parts, we can become more whole, authentic, and at peace. Some people find that therapies like Internal Family Systems (IFS), which uses “parts” language to refer to different aspects of the self, make it easier to engage with parts we’ve tried to disown. Other tools are available to help with this work, but most importantly, we need compassionate others to lend us perspective when we find it difficult to do this for ourselves. (To read more about how this can play out in couples relationships, read this blog post).