I have always found the first meeting with a new client to be one of the most difficult. It’s a bit like the roller coaster California Screamin’. One minute you are sitting still and the next minute you’re racing upward at 60 miles an hour. Therapy starts with a question: “How can I be of help?” And then suddenly this person I just met 5 minutes ago is telling me, a stranger, intimate details of their life. People often cry at this first meeting and it always surprises them. But never me. It’s quite momentous getting to this place of asking for help. And this initial session is just the first of many acts of bravery that is required during counseling.
A second is considering the question, “What is it you desire for your life?” Again, people are surprised at how hard it is to answer and even just think about this question. But it is essential. The question of our desires enables us to understand two things. First, we must know what we want to know what direction to point our lives. Second, knowing the desires of our hearts is the start of understanding what went wrong in our lives. No one has ever come to my office and said, “Please, help me understand why I am so happy and fulfilled.” People come to see me because something in their life is very broken. When life is painful, disappointing, empty and discouraging, healing and restoration require us to back track, to retrace our steps and our choices, to see where things went awry. How did I get here? Where did this mess start? And the beginning is almost always desire. Desire for love, for belonging, for affirmation, for meaning, for appreciation, for impact. Desire for peace, safety and security. So I must ask, again and again: What has your heart longed for? To spend extended time with this question is not easy and should come as no surprise that I find people quite reluctent to linger here. To ask oneself this question, to sit in it and listen to your own heart, is to invite pain, because we all have the pain of unfulfilled desires. It’s a fallen world and we were made for paradise. Can you see why there is such reluctance to walk down this road?! People come to a therapist to get OUT of pain not move deeper into it.
It is at this point that the desires of our hearts get a bad rap. It would be so much easier to shove them back into some corner of our souls and drown them out with activity and numbness. Unfortunately that never works. In fact, it back fires. Our efforts to subvert our desires create their own set of problems (more on this later). So, as uncomfortable and even painful as the question can be, it is the only way to get to the root of our problems. Problems addressed with symptom removing steps, return with vigor when not dealt with at the root. Now, please don’t hear me say that everything that is wrong in your life is the fault of your desires or what you have done with them. Oh no … there are many factors that feed depression, anxiety, anger, broken relationships, addiction … But the only factors that we can change are our own thoughts and actions (more on this later).
This deep look at longings and desires and the ensuing pain is part of why I say therapy is for the brave, not the weak (as some have suggested). I often ask my clients to take a few weeks and begin to list every longing, want or desire that comes to mind. No censoring. When they do this, the list is always illuminating. For some though, the task seems impossible, for they are so disconnected from their own heart that they have no idea what they what. For them, reconnecting to themselves takes work and time, requiring both bravery and perseverance.
The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out. Proverbs 20:5 (NIV)