Inner Reflections: The Heart of Therapy

By: Josselyn Dinnan MS, LMHC, QS

Welcome To My Mind! LOL!

I have been a counselor for over seven years now and feel that there is so much left to learn and discover in the world of therapy and mental health. I guess this is what I love most about the profession. Not only do I get to help people work through their thoughts on a daily basis, which is incredibly meaningful and rewarding for me, but I also get to be in a field that is constantly challenging, educating, and revolutionizing the way in which we interact and think. There is always something to learn with mental health.  Humans and their interactions have always interested me. How can two people have the same experience but one of them experiences a response of rage and the other one is as cool as a cucumber?  If it’s not about the external experience, it must be about the internal…. But what makes our internal experiences so different? What makes some individuals choose problematic behaviors and other individuals choose healthy coping mechanisms? What makes for healthy and unhealthy relationships with individuals who are intelligent and have good intentions?

Therapy and Counseling

has been a place for me to constantly challenge my perspective and learn something new on a daily basis.  

But the thought that continuously rings true is the idea that it starts with you. Perhaps this is where the differences in how we respond internally are discovered. When we slow down and think about our experiences, what we’ve learned along the way, our patterns, thought processes, and our automatic reactions and fears… The internal can become a bit more predictable.  But what makes us not do this on a daily basis? Perhaps this is what therapy actually works through… The fear of what it takes to be vulnerable and accountable for our experience in this world.  

Through my years in the field,

I find that people have a resistance to really and deeply lean into themselves. Perhaps we’re too afraid of what we will discover. Perhaps we believe it’s too hard to get to know ourselves.  Perhaps it feels too defeating to take accountability for our experience in the world and it somehow feels easier or justified to blame it on what might be going on around us.  Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying we are to be held accountable for what is going on around us all of the time.  Sometimes, bad terrible things just happen. But we are accountable for how we choose to experience our externals from an internal standpoint once we become aware.  It’s like buying a brand new car and not reading through the manual in its entirety. You may know the basics… the gas pedal makes it go, brakes make it stop, you know your light signals, windshield wiper, radio functions, GPS.  But let’s face it, most of us are unaware of the more intricate features our vehicles come with. It takes time to read through the manual, practice to learn how to use more sophisticated functions, and awareness over what our car can do before we can really make use of the full vehicle we bought.  

We are not so different from that car.

We are sophisticated and intricate human beings. By adulthood, we are very much aware of our basics. But if we haven’t sat down, read our manual, challenged the material, and worked to continue to learn this ever evolving machine… We are missing out on half of our features and therefore living a life that can fall victim to the externals when you don’t know the strength of your internals. It truly starts with us, but that’s also the beauty of it.