Katherine Woodward Thomas

analyzing why I am the way that I am, and then going to school to help other people analyze why they are the way they are.

It's the future that actually pulls us forward.

That is true.

But I will tell you, I have a new form of psychotherapy that I've developed, and I have a group of therapists we've been working on this together.

You can actually bring a positive possible future into your preliminary work on healing the past.

So in other words, it's like, I know you have a big destiny, and I know that your life has been really handicapped by this history that you have with trauma.

The commitment is, the context of our work is, within two years, you're gonna be standing on that stage, or you're gonna be in that happy relationship.

Let's get to work and clear that now, so that the context is still the future.

Because the future, what you initiate with the future is development.

Who will I need to be in order to manifest and sustain that future?

You don't necessarily initiate development in just healing the past.

You look at it, you feel it, you grieve it, you learn how to regulate yourself.

It's not necessarily developmental.

And most of us can't actualize our potential yet because in being stuck in past trauma,

We were actually missing certain skills and capacities that would allow us to create something other than the patterns we feel stuck in.

Yeah.

Well, you're in non-possibility.

And by that time, living in the story of I'm invisible because you had a narcissistic parent who punished you every time you, you know, dared speak your truth or shamed you, you know, inside of the I'm invisible, what's underdeveloped is the capacity to even recognize your own feelings.

or your own needs and then to be able to bring that forth to others and negotiate those needs with the assumption that other people might actually care about those needs if you brought them forward.

That's like a whole new concept to someone with invisibility because the invisibility projection onto others is that other people don't really care about my feelings and needs, so why would I have to tell them?