Wise therapy models, like Emotionally Focused Therapy and Internal Family Systems, teach us to listen more deeply while clients share their stories and the problems in their current lives. We pay close attention to the nonverbal, right-brain-to-right-brain interactions between ourselves and the client. These interactions tell us about the client’s lifetime of interpersonal experience.
Listening deeply, we hear longings for belonging for parts that have never received the recognition, caring, and acceptance that they need. We hear hopelessness, despair, rage, and panic with the fear that we won’t help them and perhaps they will never get what they need.
All of us have such longings for deeper belonging. We all long and search for:
- A home with others where we can be ourselves—open, needful, playful, and relaxed.
- The capacity to care for others and receive the care we need for ourselves.
- A deep knowing that we are precious rather than a burden.
- To be seen by elders for our potential and support so that we continue to grow in our unique presence, wisdom, and importance for others and life.
- To become elders for others—to see, create safety for, and support them in relaxing and growing to become more and more themselves.
In these turbulent times, I am delighted to share this poem by Toko-pa Turner.
I highly recommend her book Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home.
For the rebels and the misfits, the black sheep and the outsiders. For the refugees, the orphans, the scapegoats, and the weirdos. For the uprooted, the abandoned, the shunned and invisible ones.
May you recognize with increasing vividness that you know what you know.
May you give up your allegiances to self-doubt, meekness, and hesitation.
May you be willing to be unlikeable, and in the process be utterly loved.
May you be impervious to the wrongful projections of others, and may you deliver your disagreements with precision and grace.
May you see, with the consummate clarity of nature moving through you, that your voice is not only necessary, but desperately needed to sing us out of this muddle.
May you feel shored up, supported, entwined, and reassured as you offer yourself and your gifts to the world. May you know for certain that even as you stand by yourself, you are not alone.
—Toko-pa Turner
Photo by Anna Kapustina on Pexel.
