When we sit with our patient in this moment, without expecting or demanding that he change, love is able to enter the room. All we can do is describe his defenses, their price and function. We cannot take down his walls. And we have no right to do so. He has every right to keep his walls as long as he thinks they are useful. Therapy is not a place to bully patients. It is a place where we help the patient see how he bullies himself. Therapy is not a place where you take away the patient’s defenses. It’s a place where he sees how his defenses take away his emotional freedom.

Our unconditional acceptance of his every reaction stops him in his tracks. A lifetime of rejection by others ends. He has the shock of his life: you see, accept, and are curious about him and his defenses in this moment. You don’t demand that he change. You only describe what is. As a result, often for the first time, the patient experiences a demand for change, but from within himself!

When we seek emotional freedom, we often mistakenly seek freedom from emotions. Freedom from sadness, guilt, rage, and shame. But the freedom we seek will never come from becoming “free” of our humanity. Being human is our destiny.

Every day for the rest of my life I will feel sad, anxious, angry, shame, love, and joy. Every day these multi-colored clouds cross the sky. My freedom will not come from no longer feeling. My freedom will not come from arguing with the reality of my inner life as it keeps pouring over the waterfall. Water, foam, trees, trash, sticks, leaves, silt, all rush toward the falls and disappear below.

As a therapist, I will not become free by arguing with the waterfall sitting across the room from me. And his freedom will not come from rejecting whatever is flowing through him. We don’t insist that he be only a “happy”, “intimate”, or “rageful” waterfall. We simply accept and remain present to his waterfall however it flows. Thereby, he learns to bear the waterfall that he is and becomes transformed by that act, again and again.

Erich Fromm wrote about the ways we seek freedom from something. But freedom from is a life on the run. There is no freedom from reality. In contrast, Fromm proposed that we have freedom to: freedom to love, freedom to be with what is, freedom to become transformed by uniting with the emotional truth of this moment. Freedom to embrace outer and inner reality.

We seek freedom in forms it never takes, in places it’s never found: freedom from reality, from conflict, from feelings, from death. So strange, isn’t it? True freedom is not freedom from reality but within reality: freedom to embrace conflict, feelings, death—your inner life, moment by moment. That’s emotional freedom.

Jon Frederickson is the author of Co-Creating Change (May 2013), the first-ever guide to intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy that includes both an integrative theory of conflict and a moment-by-moment method of assessment to guide therapist interventions. Available for ordering now.

Why do we cry when we experience joy? A highly resistant man had a very good session during which he faced his feelings more deeply than ever before. I wondered if he thought he had faced his feelings. He said he thought so. When I said I thought he had too, he burst into tears. Why do we cry when we feel loved?

When you let me love you, a part of you must die. Perhaps it is your self-hatred. Maybe it’s your self-dismissal. Maybe it’s your perceived unworthiness. But the false self must die and crack open for my love to touch the real you hidden underneath. Every façade, every false image, every defense must die for love to touch you. And when it does, you feel this dying, this loss, and the pain of how long you waited for this moment. In the joy of being reborn is also the sadness of dying.

Our strategies which gave us safety in the past, give us loneliness as adults. And these strategies must die for love to touch you. And when love touches you, you feel the painful memories of why those strategies were necessary, and the grief over what you lost.

To allow my love to touch you, you must step into the void, the unknown where you don’t know what will happen. You will be asked to let go of your defenses, your walls, and your stories so you and I can see who you really are and what the world really is outside of your prison of defenses.

You will have to let go of your image of the unworthy one, the one who is not good enough, the one who others don’t respect, the one who is ashamed of herself, the one who deserves to die. All these images are barriers to love. To all of these best friends, you must say goodbye. You must stop clinging to them, so your hands are free to reach out to us. All these identities are just imaginary barriers between you and your destiny.

You are right to fear the love of your therapist. He has come to ask you to take off your false identities, let go of your concepts, remove what is false, and reveal who is hidden underneath. And when you do, who is underneath? A river of rage, love, guilt, grief, shame, of everything that is under the words. And that wordless truth that gives birth to the words, that wordless truth is you.

Jon Frederickson is the author of Co-Creating Change (May 2013), the first-ever guide to intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy that includes both an integrative theory of conflict and a moment-by-moment method of assessment to guide therapist interventions. Available for ordering now.