The Art of Detachment
Ivy Griffin
How did that make you feel? What’s coming up for you now? How did you manage that situation?
If you’ve been to therapy even once before, chances are you’ve encountered one or all of the phrases above. And that makes sense. A competent therapist is going to draw attention to your strengths, your thoughts and physical sensations, your feelings. Common denominator: You.
And don’t get me wrong—you are pretty great, perhaps even in ways you don’t realize. But *you* may be overwhelmed. You may be under a lot of pressure. You may be feeling a lot, particularly if you’re a highly sensitive person (HSP).
A lot of the issues we try to tackle in therapy involve a large focus on the self. Poor self-esteem, guilt and shame, overwhelm at a massive array of problems that you must solve.
One way to ease the pressure may be to take a different approach: detachment.
Detachment gets a bad rap. There’s something inherently negative about it, right? Like it’s the opposite of attaching, joining, building. It’s destructive instead of constructive. You can even pick this up from the presumed neutral arbiter of our language, the dictionary. This may be hack, but bear with me.
detachment, noun
de⋅tach⋅ment; di-ˈtach-mənt
1) the action or process of detaching : SEPARATION
2) a: the dispatch of a body of troops or part of a fleet from the main body for a special mission or service
b: the part so dispatched
c: a permanently organized separate unit usually smaller than a platoon and of special composition
3) a: indifference to worldly concerns : ALOOFNESS
b: freedom from bias or prejudice
Take another look at that last little snippet: “freedom from bias or prejudice.” Sounds nice, right? Now, you may be thinking, “Hang on there, I despise prejudice!” or “I took an anti-bias training a few months ago” or “I do my best to treat everyone fairly, equally.” That’s great. But does that “everyone” include you?
What if, instead of being incompetent or weak, it’s actually your depression telling you that? Instead of being damaged, you’re really experiencing a flare-up of your trauma symptoms? What if, instead of being flummoxed over the goods and bads, the rights and wrongs, you consider how effective you’re being? Take yourself out of the equation for a moment. Would you say to a friend, or even a stranger, what you say to yourself?
The nice thing is that therapy can already provide you with some of the added value of detachment, even if all you talk about with your therapist is you. By taking the conversation out of your head and into the open air, you have a chance to consider yourself and the situation from the perspective of a compassionate and curious stranger.
If we can try this on ourselves, we may get a fairer shake than we did before.
Warmly,
he/him/his
Supervised by Danielle Kardum, LMFT
Originally posted July 2023