So, finally I have a website! It feels like an important cyber-space, to help me to be able to reach people who might be interested in what I can offer, and where I can enjoy writing and reflecting on issues I want to communicate and put out there…

So why has it only taken two years for me to get around to it?

I could say it was because I didn’t have enough time, or that circumstances just got in the way, that I have been too busy with other things. But what is it really that sometimes gets in the way of us achieving our goals? What if it is something within us?

If we repeatedly seem to snag ourselves, then this makes it an even more important question? According to the dictionary definition, a snag is a hidden obstacle, it is likened to a tree stump, jutting out of the ground, and I guess literally stumps or trips us up. In psychological terms, it might be that which lies hidden in our unconscious.

Often therapy can help us to explore this. Our early life, through childhood, informs us early on about how the world ‘works’. And we internalise subtle messages, and covert ‘rules’ and extrapolate them, in all sorts of ways, without awareness.

Our family is the world in the first instance.

It is within the family we are exposed to ‘subtle’ rules about how the world works. Messages about what is ‘right’ for girls, and what is right for boys might be very implicitly communicated, but are internalised, and carried out in our lives without awareness. Maybe the traditions within the family or even within the wider culture suggest that girls don’t do science, or become businesswomen, and boys are strong and don’t cry. Messages such as these are often imbued in stories we are told. Things like birth stories, which perhaps tell us how placid and good we were become something of our ‘identity’. Stories can convey that there is a mould that we have to fit, and anything else is somehow unacceptable. There seems to be a narrative that becomes our own script, as if we are not in control of our own destinies.

If ‘you’re just like your father’ communicates something that might actually not fit you as an individual, then you may be left with a feeling of not being able to fulfil your own wishes… as if the script is already written and the pen is in some one else’s hand.

Aside from implicit narrative there may be other unseen forces at play. If we live in a family in which there is a competition for resources, whether that is love or attention or praise then we might become striving in adulthood but not be able to see things through as if there is an invisible force against us. If it feels as if something we have somehow deprives others, then we might feel bad about having success.

In therapy there is an opportunity to discover the nature of our underlying beliefs, stemming from experience, which unconsciously informs us to ‘abandon’ our goals. Perhaps in a family where there is a sense of competing needs, we may not feel allowed to have something for us, for example, where it feels as if there isn’t enough to go round, or where having something attracts envy or attack, may be in the form of exclusion or rejection. Understanding what might be ‘disallowed’ becomes important as in this way we might not feel able to pursue our wishes for fear of the impact…on others or on ourselves. These concerns are in the unconscious.