I spent the past weekend visiting family, while I was there, I acquired custody of the family Lego, this has been passed around various cousins and niblings since I was a child, so I was excited to get it home and find out what was hiding in the depth of the trugs it came in. However, once I started looking at it, I realised what a big task it would be to sort it all out. There were no instruction books with carefully labelled bags of parts pre-sorted and ready to be assembled. Just one trug of colourful blocks and once of black, white, and grey. It was at this point I thought about giving up just putting it away in the loft.
Instead, I did decide to get some advice and, for once, Google was my friend. I found a useful website that suggested that rather than organising by colour, I divide it up into some broad categories. If these categories became too large, then there were suggestions for dividing further., As I started making piles of different types (wheels, doors, bricks, plates, tiles, minifigs) I was reminded of how the start of therapy can sometimes feel like this. We might begin by feeling overwhelmed, with no idea where to start, our heads busy with lots of different worries and thoughts. Often a first session with me will include identifying some broad areas so, as times goes on, we can slowly start to tease them apart, taking them one at a time until they feel more manageable. Some will come apart easily, but other might be stuck and require a little bit more work, but eventually we end up with all the parts where we can see them. We may even have been able to get rid of some of the broken parts along the way.
Once we know what we have we can think about how we might want to put it all together and as we can really see the resources, we have it becomes easier to create what we want. Of course, there may be some trial an error, parts that don’t quite fit as we thought they would, or ones we struggle to place that need a bit more time and energy to figure out what they are and where they belong. But it’s all ok, if we stay curious and playful, we can try out as many ways as we want until we find the one that works for us. Therapy we have a safe space to do so without fear of judgement where we can talk through which pieces belong in which group and where it’s ok to change our mind. It’s also a space where we can leave the pieces out while we go and do other things, knowing someone else will look after them and they will be where we left them when we come back.
What would you begin to sort through if you had a safe space to do it?
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