What Does Growth Look Like?

How do you know therapy has helped?

It is a question I have thought about for many years. We tend to imagine that change should be obvious. We are less anxious. We are no longer depressed. Our relationships improve. We stop doing the thing that brought us into therapy in the first place.

These changes matter. But I have come to think that some of the deepest signs of growth are quieter and harder to measure.

Sometimes growth is simply the appearance of a pause.

Something happens. Someone disappoints us, criticizes us, or does not respond in the way we had hoped. We feel the familiar tightening in the body. Anger, fear, shame, or hurt arrives before thought. We know this place. We have been here before.

Perhaps in the past there was very little space between the feeling and the response. We attacked. We withdrew. We pursued. We became certain that we knew what the other person meant. We acted before we had the chance to understand what was happening inside us.

Then, gradually, something changes.

We begin to wonder.

Why did that affect me so deeply? What am I feeling? What did I imagine was happening? Does this feeling belong entirely to this moment, or has something older entered the room?

For me, the capacity to wonder is one of the most important signs of psychological growth. Curiosity begins to replace certainty.

We become interested in our own minds. We begin to recognize a mood rather than simply become the mood. We notice that we are anxious, frightened, angry, or withdrawn, and that what we carry into a relationship has an impact on the person with us.

We begin to understand that our words have consequences. Our silences have consequences. The way we look at someone, turn away, become impatient, disappear, or assume we already know what they are going to say becomes part of the emotional life between us.

At the same time, we become more curious about what happens inside us in response to another person. Your withdrawal may make me pursue you. Your anger may frighten me. Your need may make me want to disappear. Your anxiety may become something I begin to feel in my own body.

We affect and are affected by one another. Growth involves becoming more able to think about this movement between us without immediately deciding who is right, who is wrong, who started it, or who is to blame.

Therapy gives us a place to slow all of this down.

Wilfred Bion understood that emotional experience does not always arrive as thought. Sometimes it arrives first in the body as pressure, dread, restlessness, emptiness, or an urge to flee, cling, attack, or shut down. We feel something long before we have words for it.

Over time, what could once only be felt or acted out can become something we can think about. We begin to give language to what had no language. We become more able to stay with an experience rather than immediately getting rid of it.

And once we can think about what we feel, we have more freedom in relation to it.

But growth is not only about recognizing what has happened to us. It is also about discovering whom we have carried inside us.

We grow through identification. We take in the people who raise us long before we can decide what we want to take in. Their ways of loving, fearing, worrying, criticizing, withdrawing, controlling, comforting, and surviving become woven into us.

Years later, we may hear a parent's voice coming out of our own mouth.

We may become critical in the very way we once felt criticized. We may worry as our mother worried. We may withdraw as our father withdrew. We may take care of everyone because that was how we learned to remain close to the people we needed. We may discover that some of what we have always called our personality began as an adaptation to someone else's needs.

For a long time, these identifications simply feel like us.

Then another kind of wondering becomes possible. Is this my voice? Is this what I believe?

Is this what I want? Is this how I want to love, or is this how love was given to me?

This is part of the slow work of de-identification. We begin to separate from the people who formed us without needing to erase them. We do not have to reject our parents in order to become different from them. We can begin to distinguish between what we inherited, what we needed in order to survive, what we continue to repeat, and what we now want to choose.

There is mourning in this.

We may have to mourn the parents we needed but did not have. We may have to relinquish the hope that if we become good enough, successful enough, loving enough, or self-sacrificing enough, something in the past will finally be repaired.

We may have to give up the fantasy that we can go back and receive differently what could not be given then.

But mourning also makes room.

Our parents can become people rather than only the enormous figures of childhood. We can see their limitations, their histories, their wounds, and what they themselves inherited. We can feel compassion without surrendering our own experience. We can love them without becoming them. We can understand them without having to excuse everything that happened.

And we can begin to meet ourselves outside of them.

Perhaps this is what therapy gradually makes possible. The therapist's curiosity becomes something we carry inside ourselves. The questions once asked of us become questions we can ask ourselves. We develop an internal space in which feeling does not have to become action immediately. We can observe. We can wonder. We can listen.

We still become angry. We still become frightened, jealous, envious, defensive, and sad. We still repeat ourselves. The past does not disappear because we understand it.

But perhaps we recognize it sooner.

Perhaps we can say, I know this feeling. I know this voice. I know this old place in myself.

And then comes the possibility that did not exist before.

I do not have to go there.

Maybe growth is not becoming someone new.

Maybe it is becoming more able to recognize what we have carried, what belongs to those who came before us, and what belongs to us now.

It is the capacity to pause where we once reacted, to wonder where we once knew, to listen where we once defended, and to choose where we once repeated.

And perhaps, somewhere in that process, a different question begins to emerge.

Who am I when I no longer must be who I needed to be with them?

The answer does not come all at once.

We grow into it.