The tasks of therapy:

🔸 Compassion for the client and acceptance of them as they are, together with their childhood ways of adapting to life (it matters to legitimise and accept the way they were forced to use from early childhood in order to survive within their own system).

🔸 Help in becoming aware of the price the client now has to pay for the patterns that once protected them.

🔸 Confrontation with the illusions about a reward for suffering, or about the high morality and holiness of their way of relating to themselves and to the world.

🔸 A gradual turn towards the client’s own wishes and needs, legitimising them, and working through the guilt and fears that accompany this turn.

🔸 Identifying and working through manipulative, indirect forms of aggression; teaching direct forms of contact and of expressing feelings, and supporting the client in expressing them.

🔸 Identifying and showing the repetitiveness of any forms of destructive behaviour, including violence towards oneself.

🔸 Creating an ordered way of being, and a client–therapist relationship focused on mutual worth and on the rights we hold as persons.

🔸 Support for the idea that one must protect one’s own boundaries and carry personal responsibility, before oneself and those close, for one’s own safety, well-being, health and full life.

Based on the book “Girl on a Ball” by Irina Mlodik. When suffering becomes a way of life.

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