Is 2023 the time to “sort yourself out” and claim your right to be happy?

You do not need to continue feeling miserable. No matter what dramas are playing out in the world, a sound and happy relationship with yourself can help you stand strong.

Everyone has a history of some kind – but how much do you bring this with you into your current daily life?  How much can you live in the present without the past breaking through into today?

Living in the past can take the form of many different kinds of unhappiness, such as feeling you’re not good enough, feeling trapped in repeating cycles, feeling you can never get over the loss of people dear to you, or being caught in memories, resentments, internalised trauma and repeating patterns of relating.

This is what modern depth psychotherapy is for. You are not obliged to continue feeling miserable, fed up, trapped, squished or drowning in overwhelming feelings such as grief, anxiety, fear of taking a risk, or believing you’re a failure.

Yes, it takes some courage, it takes some work and determination, and some investment in yourself. You’ll need to pay much more attention to your feelings – those dreaded feelings you have been trying so hard to avoid, because the feelings carry important information we need to listen to.  You’ll need to bring patience and self-acceptance to the table, as self-criticism makes positive change very difficult. You’ll need to become interested and curious in yourself , and be open to discover what it is that activates you to keep recycling old traumas and hurts. Yet this work is not so bad if it is done in a spirit of kindness and good humour! What is your life for if it is not to learn, expand and develop your potentials? Why leave it any longer?

Often, it is our deep-set, unconscious assumptions and beliefs – trained into us over decades – that determine our behaviour, and our resulting perceptions shape what happens in life. Everything that happens to you happens in your mind. Your mind is the place where we need to understand what has really been happening to you. Once you can see this for yourself, then you have a choice to change your mind, to make new and different decisions. Much of our thinking, decision-making and actions are unconscious- meaning that we do not fully realise what is driving us.

It’s part of the work of psychotherapy to find out what has been lying in your unconscious and causing havoc in your life. You then get to choose the fundamental beliefs and values you want to live by. These are down to you, but happiness, joy, playfulness, creativity and caring for yourself like a loving parent will take you in a more uplifting direction.

So – do you believe you have to put up with bad feelings, and that you are to blame because you can’t resolve this on your own? Could you begin to let go of some of the past luggage you have been carrying around everywhere you go? Perhaps none of it is your fault!

If you’re in a self-perpetuating cycle, you may need to let a trusted person into your world to help you see it differently. We need to do this self development and healing work with support and kindness, where we sit together in your experience, with open-minded acceptance, while you learn to deconstruct the old hurtful, damaging ways you unconsciously adopted, and discover how to build more real, fresh, spiritually and emotionally alive ways of relating to yourself and being in the world.