Keep Asking Questions

Questions are the key to bridging the conscious and subconscious.

Photo by Taylor Wilcox on Unsplash

When I first experienced psychotherapy as a kid, I was initially perturbed by the endless questions in answer to my own.

Why am I sad? Why do you think you’re sad? How come I feel so alone? Why do you think you feel alone? Am I doing the right things? Do you think you’re doing the right things?

That’s totally annoying, right? I think I went off on my therapist about that (in as much as a seven-year-old kid goes off on someone). What this taught me, albeit indirectly, was to look within for answers before looking without. Not that I comprehended that lesson and took it into myself for a couple of decades, though.

I’ve taken the therapy route multiple times in my life. I’ve seen a range of psychologists, psychiatrists, and so on. The last formal therapist I saw — about fifteen years ago — was the best of them.

I believe this was not just because he asked the right questions (or answered my questions with the right questions), but I was ready to ask those questions.

Together, we learned that I had managed to shunt most of my ability to feel emotions somewhere unreachable. Negative emotions were easy — love and positive emotions? Less so. But the questions he asked, that I…