How therapy can help you deal with difficult emotions and truly grow.

All true growth involves facing challenges and overcoming limitations. There are always internal and external factors that can get in the way of development. Often these internal factors are complex emotional states and thoughts. How long you know what to do in relation to emotions and thoughts often determines how long or not you will be in a problem.

When I say “you know,” I don’t mean conceptual knowledge, but experience. Most of the programs that society provides us with regarding emotions, thoughts and other internal phenomena are poorly working or even harmful. For this reason, it is so important to know and be able to apply in practice psychological tools that actually work, which are often counterintuitive.

The mind encourages you to do logical things, such as running away from fear. But the same process pathologizes the feeling of fear in situations where there is no real danger, consolidating the reaction and spreading it through the networks of relationships inside your mind, which looks, for example, as a growing fear that spreads to other objects. Sometimes these objects can be very far from the original ones. Generalization of fear occurs. Much becomes dangerous and much becomes avoided.

Is the mind, with its ideas about fear, to blame for this? Yes and no. You are a descendant of surviving ancestors who faced situations where it was better to be on guard than to waste danger. The problem is that you can also look for danger where there is none. And with the development…