I recently opened a new counseling office at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in the Donelson area of Nashville. (I am not doing counseling there myself, but am renting that office to other therapists.) I did the re-decorating of the office myself. When I first went to the office, it needed a little work. There was peeling paint, missing trim on the walls, and old light fixtures. There were also some peculiar things in the office. The remnants of an old wall heater remained attached to the wall and oddly, there was a second doorknob on the door to the office. I could see why the heater had been abandoned and why it would be a challenge to remove from the wall without having to do major repair to the wall, but that extra doorknob, I could only imagine how that might have come to be. Only one of the two doorknobs actually worked. So, I imagined that at some point the original doorknob had stopped working and was replaced, but the knob was not replaced in its original position, but a new doorknob was placed above the first on the door. I could not remove the non-functioning doorknob without replacing the whole door. So, I painted around them both.
The Work of therapy is not unlike the office. Like the new office bore the marks of those who had inhabited it previously, our lives and relationships do bear the marks – positive and negative – of our previous experiences. When we take time to tend to the needs of our internal world, there is much work that can be done to bring about change. We can replace things that used to work, but no longer work. We can add things that are missing – new skills, new understandings, and the like. The work that we do on ourselves can radically change who we are. I could have written about how sometimes, we avoid working on things in our lives because the task seems too big or we fear it will cost too much to do the work we think we need to do. That might have been a valid reflection, however, I began to think about how in the work of therapy, there are sometimes things about us that just do not seem to change. For an individual, there seem to be some things about our core personality that remain true no matter what. John Gottman, in his study of marriages, has noted that two-thirds of the things that couple’s fight about are things that cannot be resolved. They are issues that cannot be changed or issues that have no easy resolution.
Part of the work of therapy, is realizing that some things
about us or our situations cannot be changed. Such things must be examined and
understood as best as possible, but the work of therapy becomes acceptance of
the given reality and to working with it.
This can be challenging depending on what the issue is. However, we can learn to accept and
adapt. We cannot always remove the extra
doorknobs of our lives or repair the ones that are broken. We cannot always remove the things that no
longer work without doing more damage or creating more difficulty. So, we learn to make peace with what is. We stop fighting against what cannot change
and learn to accept. This may mean
accepting certain things about ourselves or about those close to us that are
difficult, but it is possible to learn to make peace or adapt.
If you would like to see before and after pictures of the
office, visit https://www.counselingatstphilips.com/news
