“You need therapy if:”
Let’s be honest. You don’t NEED therapy. You have already dealt with countless difficult situations throughout your life, perhaps without ever even considering psychotherapy. The proof is right there: you made it this far, after all.
By all intents and purposes, you already have everything you need. And even if you did end up arranging sessions with a psychotherapist, it’s roughly the same situation as, let’s say, hiring a personal trainer: at the end of the day, you are still the one that has to do the push-ups.
So why am I here saying this and performing what looks like professional harakiri?
Because it’s the truth. Psychotherapy is not the solution, psychotherapy is not the only way, and psychotherapy is not the shortest path out of the woods.
Psychotherapy is simply a process, and as time goes by, I respect and appreciate that process more and more.
To boil things down to their essence, psychotherapy is not a tool that will help us become ‘normal’ again. This is an old idea from the days when mental health professionals presented themselves as experts on the human mind and were willing to engage in many unethical practices by adopting the position that they somehow knew what was best for everyone. Because if there is something that is ‘best’, then there is something that is ‘worst’, and if there is ‘normal’, then there is ‘abnormal’.
Let’s dispense of these things and be clear. The therapist works from a position of expertise and experience in his or her craft. He has been through ‘the process’ of psychotherapy many times, with many people. But the therapist does not, cannot, and never will know what is best for YOU.
Only YOU know this.
So the goal of therapy is not to become ‘normal’. The goal of therapy is to engage in the process towards becoming WHOLE.
Do you need this? Perhaps not, and it’s not what people usually think of when they want to start to engage in therapy.
But by working through our inner conflicts, those parts of us that pull us in different directions, and finding a way to embrace all of them and be at peace, we find that the process is indeed useful. It lifts a massive burden off the shoulders.
And that’s exactly why psychotherapy has endured as a profession.
In psychotherapy there are no gurus, there is no special secret knowledge, and there are no experts in the old sense of the word. It simply provides the time and place for all those conversations with ourselves that, to our detriment, are easy to postpone. It offers a way to express what was until now unsaid and to explore what it all feels like and what it means.
I am saying all this because I want to be transparent with all of you. I see countless posts every day that are filled with promises of happiness and inspiring quotes, and I am tired. That’s not what psychotherapy is about. It can be, but it’s not all of it, and it’s certainly not what makes it so powerful.
Psychotherapy is powerful because does not aim towards happiness, but towards freedom. Freedom from the pain of the past, freedom from the anxiety of the future, and freedom from the paralysing fear that lies in the responsibilities of the present moment. That is not an easy path to walk, and even if we get there, there are no guarantees that we will stay there without having to keep fighting for it. But people have waged real historical wars and put their lives on the line for the sake of having the freedom to choose: that’s how powerful that feeling is.
There is nothing in the entire world more inspiring and life-affirming than the process of psychotherapy. And if you feel that this sounds like a war worth fighting, then I would be honoured to be a part of your efforts.
