ABSTRACT
If you have read the book carefully up to this point, you will realize that although restoration therapy is actually quite simple in content, it becomes deep and profound in the process of therapeutic practice. After all, there are only four major signposts along the way in restoration therapy. First, we help people understand and recognize their pain cycles. This is the joining stage of therapy where the therapist listens carefully and is empathetic to the story of the client. The therapist then starts helping the client see his or her points of emotional dysregulation in terms of identity and safety or the status of relational love and trustworthiness. As these essential feelings and primary emotions emerge in the context of the story, the therapist tracks what the client does or his or her reactive coping to the violation of love and trustworthiness which has prompted the disturbances of identity and safety. The therapist then draws this cycle in a cognitive map also including how relational partners themselves react to the client’s reactivity. This is how we get to the pain cycle and, in normal types of cases, it takes between five and eight sessions. Second, we help the client understand and experience the truth or the emotionally regulating counterpart that disrupts his or her feelings of violated identity or sense of safety. As we have stated before, this is the most difficult aspect of therapy in restoration therapy because it is the strategic place where the client can recognize his or her truest and most peaceful identity and cope with the implications of safety in an unsafe world. The previous two chapters give detailed information about what we have learned thus far in helping the client consolidate these truths both emotionally and experientially and, in normal types of cases, we find that most often this work takes between five and eight sessions.
