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Symptoms are not just something to suppress as quickly as possible.

There are various therapeutic techniques for listening to and dialoging with one's symptoms.

It takes courage, patience, humility, and receptivity to truly hear what our symptoms are trying to tell us.

This post is Part 4 of a series.

There are certain types of psychotherapy that, unlike cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), consider signs and symptoms to be a way of communicating with ourselves and others and, therefore, encourage patients to carefully listen to what such sometimes seemingly senseless phenomena might have to say about how we are really feeling and what we can do if we wish to feel better. Here are a few examples.

Famed and flamboyant psychiatrist and Gestalt therapist Frederick "Fritz" Perls (1893-1970) considered symptoms to be the consequence of "unfinished business" (i.e., unexpressed, suppressed, or unresolved emotions or impulses of which we are unaware that manifest themselves in sundry symptoms and signs). His rather theatrical, dramatic, and existential approach to such affective or somatic symptoms might be to encourage the patient to become more keenly aware in the present moment of what and how they are physically and emotionally experiencing the symptom as it is happening right now—sometimes urging them to intentionally amplify or exaggerate the symptom—to help discover and disclose its significance by becoming more conscious of what kind of inner conflict or tension could be motivating........

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