TGIF: When Therapy Is Intimidating
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Dear Community,
Welcome to our weekly advice column TGIF - Your Weekly Reset. Each week I will answer questions from you (or topics of interest!), bringing in themes of mental wellness-related tools, reminders of gratitude, innovative solutions, and a summary of my own feelings related to the topic.
Submit your questions as often as you’d like and I’ll be sure to address them in our upcoming columns.
This week’s question comes from someone brand new to therapy:
Hi - I have never been to therapy but I feel like so many more people I know are going. I’m nervous though about having to spend a lot of time talking about the past. I need some help in my life but I just don’t know if therapy is really what I need. I guess I don’t have a question but more of like a hesitation towards the whole process. Help!
Dear Reader,
I few things to start us off: I see you and I understand.
When I first graduated from school with my counseling degree, I was reluctant to say I was a “psychotherapist”. The term felt too clinical, too medical, and too off-putting. For a while I had a hard time sharing what I did for a job because I didn’t want people to feel like they couldn’t be open and honest around me. And it’s a legitimate concern - often, someone at an event who I’ve been chatting with will suddenly stop and ask me, “Oh, you’re totally psychoanalyzing me now, right?”
Let’s be real- no matter how far mental health destigmatizing has come along, unfortunately there is still a stigma about being “someone who goes to therapy”.
Many people believe that therapy is only for a crisis and if you have a therapist, you are saying that something is wrong with you. People also believe that if you have a therapist then you are incapable of addressing your own problems and do not have friends to talk to.
With a lot of this misinformation and misunderstanding, it’s easy to become intimidated by therapy. Starting to see a therapist can feel embarrassing or like you’re a failure for having to ask for help.
Reader, I want to tell you - while it’s common to feel these things, you do not need to.
If you’re feeling uneasy about the process, I want to offer you some information on how to feel less intimidated by therapy:
Therapy doesn’t have to be just sitting and talking. Not all therapists are trauma-based therapists. Diving into your past, reliving childhood experiences, and blaming your parents does not have to be your experience of therapy! Your therapist may be trained in trauma but that’s not the direction you need to go in. Your therapist may have skills to make therapy not feel like therapy, meaning you’re going on a walk, kicking a soccer ball, drawing, playing games, dancing or doing yoga in session. With the right therapist, there are lots of points of entry to connect and map out your own path.
When wellness “fails”, therapy prevails. We know that lifestyle habits that involve frequent movement, good sleep hygiene, proper nutrition, and healthy social connections all benefit mental health. But what happens when you just cannot seem to stick to these wellness rituals? How do you motivate yourself, understand your “whys” and not chronically beat yourself up for “failing” again? Therapy helps bridge the gap between what habits you want to instill and how to actually stick to them.
Therapy helps with lifestyle hacks. Want better concentration, focus and impulse control? Looking to level up your performance in athletics or fitness? Hoping to reduce your reactivity and irritability, increase patience and self-control? Therapy helps optimize your life. You do not have to be “broken” or needing fixing, you simply can use therapy as a tool for self-betterment. Whether you want better sleep, to make healthier choices, increase creativity, or have more energy - working with a trained therapist can help identify areas of growth, unveil your common traps and give you tools to meet your goals.
Therapy 101 is a lot like goal coaching, elevated. Like I mentioned above, the basic layers of therapy mimic life coaching. Most clients need to start at the basics - exploring lifestyle habits, what support systems you have in place, favorite activities, goals and areas for growth. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps you set goals and create accountability by just bringing awareness to your thoughts, feelings and reactions. Ever wonder why you cannot stick to that workout routine or get lost scrolling online? A trained therapist helps you peel back the layers to reveal your authentic self and what you truly desire. You may be surprised that the latest TikTok wellness trend actually isn’t living your best life. Therapy can help you get in touch with what genuinely makes you happy versus what you think you should be doing. Getting touch with your authentic pleasures makes way for more gratitude, peace and strong sense of self.
Mindfulness matters. With any desire to change, it starts with basic building blocks. We address these in our own mindfulness-based CBT models with clients and they all involve slowing down first to speed up. Mindfulness is not all woo-woo meditation. Mindfulness is a practice of slowing down enough to witness your thoughts, behaviors and reactions to the world so you can know better to do better. Therapy helps you build the presence, awareness, regulation and self-esteem to approach all of life with more curiosity so you can get out of your own way to truly form into the version of yourself you’ve always aimed to be. It’s not that you are not good enough now, it’s about recognizing your full potential as a human being. Because with a little help, what if you and your life could be better than you ever imagined possible? Why not try?
So, dear reader, if you’re still on the fence with going to therapy (or know someone who is), I hope this has helped you. I’m always of the belief that there’s only risk in holding myself back.
Trying something new, albeit a bit scary, is never something I regret. Every challenge welcomes an opportunity, right? I think each of us owes it to our future selves to try and do the best we can and a little help is never a bad thing to get there.
Hugs hugs hugs. Hope to see you around soon.
Kerry
