Our Heart’s Desire
Written by Ashley Schumacher, M.S.
“Write whatever your heart desires.”
When Shannon offered me this complete freedom to choose a topic for this blog, her words sparked a small thrill of delight, wonder, and possibility for me. And then I wondered, resting in this delight, how I might offer this same possibility to you, dear reader, in the context of exploring the therapeutic process.
What if we don’t know what our hearts desire?
Many people enter therapy because something hurts, some need or desire remains unmet. Old wounds continue to shape current experiences or cast shadows on future hopes. We often seek counseling because we want relief from pain or suffering, and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is intrinsically GOOD and natural, morally and clinically sound to first seek to help alleviate our natural suffering before surrendering what is beyond our control. But initially perhaps too few venture to inquire or allow themselves to imagine that therapy frequently becomes, has the capacity to become something more.
As healing occurs, people often discover desires within themselves they did not know were possible or even existed. A person who has spent years accommodating others may discover a desire to take up space. Someone who learned to survive through perfectionism may discover a longing for uninhibited freedom and the ability to play (eutropelia)- to return to a place of wonder, curiosity, and imagination. A person who has lived primarily in reaction to past hurts may begin to imagine a future where they respond, not from fear but by choice, agency, and volitional freedom.
In the therapeutic sense, human development is not merely the reduction of symptoms, but a gradual unfolding, a gentle evolution, and at times, a reawakening of capacities that may have been present all along but hidden beneath pain, shame, trauma, or survival. Still more, it can facilitate the actualization and maturation of latent potential co-constructed in the therapeutic relationship itself.
Just like Shannon created space for this reflection, therapy can create space for curiosity, where the clinician invites the client to ask not only, "What is wrong?” but also, “What is right?” and further more, ‘What is possible?” From an integrative perspective where “All things are possible with God” (Matthew 19:26) this is an invitation to return to the purest place of human innocence before the fall in our created-ness, in our created “GOOD”ness (Genesis 1:31), if you will. It is also an invitation to share in this divine attribute of God as co-creators of possibility and to return to the Pre-fall Eden of wonder.
In this way, therapy can hold the promise of both restoration and generation. It can help heal what is wounded whilst also opening us to desires, relationships, and ways of being and perceiving we have yet to imagine for ourselves.
Sometimes, the greatest gift of therapy is not finding what we were looking for, but discovering possibilities we did not know existed and co-creating possibilities perhaps yet still in the mind of God, hidden in the deepest recesses of the human heart, waiting to be realized.
So, I invite you too, to linger a while longer, to also delight in, wonder, and hold possibility for, ‘Whatever your heart desires’...
