Episode 2: Marble Cake

The Five C’s: Part 2

Moist chocolate cake is probably one of my favorite desserts. Then there’s marble cake which is both delicious AND pretty to look at, with chocolate and vanilla swirls, and sometimes strawberry! Yum! Anybody’s mouth watering yet?

Marble cake is actually a good visual of what I want to describe in the therapeutic process I use. Granted, psychotherapy is not chocolate and vanilla that’s swirled and yummy, but instead is swirled emotions and thoughts that are sometimes NOT yummy. It is more healthy in the long run than cake, though, just sayin...

Over the course of my practice, I’ve identified 5 “ingredients” (like the recipe for a swirl-layered marble cake) for moving through and sorting out some of the emotions and beliefs that keep us stuck in automatic responses and emotions, like shame, self-judgment, and “future tripping” (got that phrase from a client).

I believe the key to psychotherapeutic healing starts with softening our hearts toward ourselves which offers more choice in our reactions vs the automatic (somewhat impulsive) responses we rarely think about, like I introduced you to in the last blog (https://www.drbrainchange.info/brainstormblog/2018/2/11/the-pencil-exercise).

Like marble cake, the “swirled layers” of these 5 “ingredients” are not distinct, symmetrical, or linear. They are more of a process that repeats, stirs, and “flows”. I liken this process to the actual making of the marble cake, where you find a recipe listing the ingredients, combine those ingredients in a bowl, stirring them together. Before you put the batter in the oven you’ll need a cake pan, heat, and time.

Parallelling this analogy to psychotherapy, “recipes and ingredients” are often found in healthy relationships like with a professional therapist. And the “pan” represents a safe, judgment free environment to explore our impulses and our automatic habits. The “oven” portion of this analogy can be symbolic for the heat of life, the struggles in relationship and difficulties that frequently accompany life on planet Earth. And finally “time” for baking a cake parallels the time we must give ourselves to process psychological and emotional wounds and to heal.

So, for this “recipe”, here are the ingredients for the “marbled” therapeutic process:

1 - Catch the automatic

2 - Compassion for your humanity

3 - Curiousity and Contemplation of where the automatic started

4 - Challenge the young belief system you discover through your curiosity

5 - Choice arises for continuing the automatic or trying something new

The “mixing and baking” happens as we allow each C to have a place in our lives.

Next up - Slime…. (the first C)