Everyone knows: you are walking in a joyful and dreamy mood, captured by the most inspiring ideas about the world or about yourself (substitute the appropriate one) and suddenly - you hit a pillar with your forehead! - sparks, pain, - and the usual feeling of the imperfection of life. Welcome to reality! By the way, anything can serve as a pillar for our forehead: a call from a boss, a question from a psychotherapist, frank words from a friend - and this is what seemed so cloudless - beautiful takes on real features and becomes just... life. Sad? Disappointing? Maybe. But without reality it is impossible to live life and change something in it if it does not suit us. Holy Fathers have a strange, at first glance, phrase: “When you see an ascetic briskly climbing up into heaven, quickly grab him by the legs and drag him down.” Actually, if something doesn’t suit us, then there are two ways: not to notice and run away, or to see and admit. You can change something only in the second case. In the first case, we will have to escape further and further with the help of substances - this is how addictions are formed. Often we fragmentarily escape from reality into our thoughts - and then it is easier to bring us back - to the aid of the corners of the cabinet, against which you can bang your head, or “inconvenient” words and actions other people and so on... The company met on Fridays, drank coffee and other more meaningful drinks, respected each other and were inspired by the idea “what a great team we are, what mutual understanding we have!” And then suddenly they quarreled out of nowhere - and learned a lot of new and uninspiring things about each other. And it turned out that in reality there was no understanding at all - only the need for it and imagination... An indicator of how much we are in reality can be not only a tendency to addiction and loud phrases, but also debts (a person cannot accept the amount of his income), lies ( persistent desire to make one’s own fantasies a reality), the position of the victim (infantile refusal to grow up), etc. Returning to reality is often painful. But this is how we certainly begin to feel life. The longer, deeper and more firmly a person was in unreality, the longer and more painful the return will be. It’s like abstinence - fragmentary for a newbie who has been drinking too much, chronic for an alcoholic. Often the main and best “side effect” of therapy is this very return to reality and acceptance of it. By gradually expanding the space of awareness of this own reality, you can change something, feel life, have fun, cry and laugh - be really happy.