Autobiography as a therapeutic tool.

Why and what for autobiography as a therapeutic tool? Autobiography is an extremely interesting way of exploring the lived journey. Through it, we go back in time, connect with events, people, significant milestones in our history and bring them to light.

It is an opportunity to take a journey through one's own life, family heritage, the choices we made, what events marked us, in order to better affirm future projection.

Autobiography is the "where we come from" that in part carries within itself the germ of "where we are going." It is a very interesting self-knowledge tool because it offers us the ability to choose, to select from everything that is part of our own life journey, what we recognize as significant. This will help us to see our history in a different way and also ourselves.

To write about one's own life is to delve into the depths of one's own existence. Dare to investigate memories, in scenes, perhaps, painful, to be able to accept and elaborate them. It is the journey that is going to show us which people intervened positively and which ones complicated our journey. And, in addition, it will confront us with our own decisions and the consequences they had in our lives.

Putting together the autobiography is like starting a therapeutic job. We will have to see what we focus on, what we make visible, and what we do not. Something is always left out in the story, and that filter that we do already says a lot about who we are. If we also take it to a therapeutic context, the therapist will be able to intervene making visible what is not present or contributing from its external place.

The autobiographical account is a map that in a way tells us: "It was this way" and gives us many tools to understand what it is now and, probably, what it could be in the future.

The very exercise of thinking about where to start, what to tell, and what not, is already therapeutic in itself. It makes us researchers of our own history. We probably start to wonder what we were doing in this or that year, who we surrounded ourselves with, what was important to us at that time.

Writing the autobiography awakens the desire to investigate what happened. See photos, rethink links, rediscover what was difficult and how it was resolved or coped with.

It allows us precisely to visualize ourselves in other circumstances, showing us tools that we deployed at the time and that perhaps we did not remember having within reach. Acknowledging everything lived, observing that path and the obstacles that were overcome, empowers us. It allows us, in the right context, to make strengths visible by enabling them again.

At the same time, it shows us what was difficult, the mistakes, the losses, and the times when we felt defeated. If we are willing to observe them, these points of our history that we sometimes reject, are the ones that have the most to teach us. Because it is from them that changes and greater integration can be generated.

The autobiography is a first-person account that unites the pieces of our experiences and allows us, for a moment, to observe much of what we go through like a novel or a movie. Giving us the opportunity to observe it from another position, enabling new integrations and possible choices.

 

Thank You