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“Imagine you are hiking up a mountain.”
Part of an occasional series about phrases that this therapist finds himself repeating, often.
As a clinician in private practice, one of the phrases that I hear myself saying over and over is this: “Imagine you are hiking up a mountain.” This particular phrase emerges in the context of a relapse of some sort. People generally make good progress through the beginning of therapy, but then there can be a plateau and an inevitable relapse.
Based on my experience, here’s what that usually looks like.
Imagine that you are hiking up a mountain. You have hiked along a good while and have been able to look out here and there and see your progress. But then you make a misstep. Or something in your path changes. Or some outside event happens … and you fall down.
The fall hurts, physically. That fall may hurt your pride or sense of progress. The fall reminds you of times when you have been down before. There is fear there that this is the “beginning of the end”.
That fall reminds you of the trauma again.
Because our brain’s first impulse is survival, it quickly goes back in time to how bad it felt at the bottom of that mountain. We may even physically feel some of those…
