House Therapy is about you and your connection to your home. What is a home? Is it a place where we have accidentally found ourselves over time or is it a carefully designed structure, which conforms to our every need and want? Perhaps it is something that exists between these two extremes, or not. I imagine that our homes are as unique as we are ourselves, or at least our perception of them is. The home, holder of the hearth (see fireplace & kitchen stove), a place you may return to at day’s end, for rest, replenishment and relaxation. What would your life be like without a home to go to? We often hear about the lives of the homeless on the six a clock news. Homeless children who may have fled domestic abuse, or ennui, to live on the city streets, and usually these poor unfortunates are paraded as examples of extreme social neglect. For the home is considered
one of the most basic requirements of life, indeed the right to have a home/shelter, a place to call your own, no matter how small or poorly maintained, is as important as is having enough food to eat. Our home is our refuge and sanctuary from the challenges we may face in the outer world, as we bid for survival and success.
House Therapy: Your Home Is Like The Inside Of Your Head
House Therapy is about how your home is like the inside of your head. As above so below, kind of stuff. The way we lay out things within our homes is very much akin to the arrangement upstairs and how we think. Understanding this connection allows us to work with ourselves more effectively. We can change things in our lives by reordering the plan on the ground. Every room inside your house or home has a meaning in regard to your personality. Every particular part of you has a special place within your home. We are all a gathering of voices living under one roof. House Therapy: Your home is like the inside of your head.
House Therapy – Discover Yourself at Home
The first principle of a home, I would posit, is that it be a place of safety, warmth and some comfort. What makes a home safe? Is it the bricks and mortar it may be made of? Well if you were one of those infamous “three little pigs” the answer would most definitely be yes. It all depends on what wolf is at your door I suppose? Once you have the structural elements in place, a home and its safety then become issues of who and what inhabits your home. We imbue everything in our lives with our selves, with projections of who we are, our loves, families, gods and interests. Our homes are almost like living, breathing entities that smell, feel, look,
sound and most probably taste a bit like us. Very much in the vein of the tortoise and its shell, we are linked to our homes by everything that makes us uniquely human.
Read House Therapy & Find Freedom
Of course homes change as we do, they reflect our stages of life: As children in a home, they are places to explore and to sometimes fear when the lights go out at night, they are also like the favourite clothes our mother and father might wear; and are thus forever associated with them. When we are teenagers they can be experienced as prisons of extreme boredom, never changing in their appearance or nature, always contaminated by the reactionary attitudes of our parents and places we might dream of escaping. Perhaps as young adults, in our first experience of living away
from mum and dad, they are places of glorious freedom. With no one to nag you to clean up, and any questionable hygiene issues and structural disrepairs are experienced positively as charming aspects of freshly found domestic bliss. Then as first time parents the home becomes a place requiring attentive renovation to make safe, quiet, and nurturing for your beloved offspring. As a family home for our children it is often a bustling, noisy place shaking with all the life going on there. Then after the
children have left the nest, quiet descends and the contrast can be mausoleum like after years of frenetic activity. We then may move to something smaller, just for two and with lots of retiring quiet. Homes are, I think, three dimensional mirrors, endlessly adjusting to our own evolving reflection throughout our lives.
Therapizing Your Life Via Your Home
Each of us is a unique collection of disparate traits and views that we have brought together with the help of family and social conditioning. Our identity is crafted in this manner through our upbringing. We may be one person but that person is made up of various personality traits. The elements within us have appetites. Some say we are like small zoos or nature reserves where a variety of animals roam and play. Problems in our lives are often caused by certain voices not being heard or fed. Domineering parts of ourselves can censor out other parts to the detriment of our own happiness and wellbeing. It is important that all of our characteristics are seen and heard in their appropriate settings.
“What Is a Trait?
A trait is a personality characteristic that meets three criteria: it must be consistent, stable, and vary from person to person.2 Based on this definition, a trait can be thought of as a relatively stable characteristic that causes individuals to behave in certain ways.”
- (Kendra Cherry, 2023)
A Therapy Based On How Houses Are Like Our Filing Systems
Society and family can seem to favour certain parts of ourselves over others. This can cause issues in our lives. Suppressing stuff can work for awhile but eventually these personality traits want to be heard. Inner conflicts can occur within us if we allow these things to be pushed down for too long. The ramifications of this can be destructive to those around us and to our own lives. We each have a life to live and who we truly are must not be impeded in the greater scheme of things. House Therapy can assist in delving into this sometimes complex world. Solutions can be garnered through observation within the House Therapy prism. As above so below.