practical next steps . You have to deal with alleviating the pain in the present , the most pressing symptoms first . It ’ s like emergency room triage . If you come in with severe pain in your abdomen , we ’ re going to help alleviate the pain first and foremost . But after that , we need to get to the root of what ’ s causing this pain to begin with . It could be anything from indigestion to your appendix , all the way to pregnancy !
The same thing goes with emotional health : We need to get to the root . So as we continued your therapy process , eventually we would get to your past . Somewhere between sessions 2 and 6 , I ’ d ask you to do what I call the Timeline Activity . I would ask you to write down significant events , starting from your earliest memories all the way to who you are today , and note experiences that have shaped you for both good and bad . And then we ’ d talk through it with our eyes open to themes that might come up again and again in your
life . We ’ re looking for emotional responses that might come up repeatedly without your awareness . We ’ re looking for patterns . We ’ re identifying roots .
Carla was one of those clients . She was so desperately trying to keep the relationships in her life strong that she was starting to feel exhausted , drained , and empty . She had a pattern of doing all or most of the work in her relationships — the giving , the serving , the forgiving , the initiating — out of fear that people wouldn ’ t like her or wouldn ’ t stick around . She felt like she had to prove to others that she was worth having around ; she needed to be needed in order to feel secure in the relationship . But ultimately , she felt alone . She was trapped in a host of one-sided relationships , and her deepest fear of feeling alone was starting to become a reality .
Again and again , in different stages of her life , we began noticing that pattern . Out of fear
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