Choosing therapy
If you’re considering therapy, you might hear some pretty tough questions in your head: Do I really need therapy? What exactly do you do in therapy? What even is therapy? Could it help me? And what if it can’t?
What makes these questions all the harder to answer is that when you’re asking them, you’re generally not feeling your best. Often, the questions are loudest when you’re struggling and stressed, and truly, everything is harder when you’re stressed. In short, these are times when you’re long on pain and questions and short on answers. You are, in a word, overwhelmed.
But let’s freeze the frame for a moment. Let’s take a breath, and take a step back. Maybe, if it feels right, take another breath or two. With a little bit of space, what else do we notice?
One thing I see is that this isn’t the first time you’ve found yourself drained and in pain. The shapes and colors of your struggles may have shifted, but struggle itself—you’ve done that. You’ve gotten through it before. The clamor inside and the noise outside overtalks—overshouts, even—your wisdom, your knowing, but the knowing is in there, because the experience is in there. And so, too, is the capacity to persevere and to heal. You’ve gotten through difficult times before. Maybe it wasn’t pretty, but you did it. I know that because you’re here right now.
What I also see as I look at this frame is that with you and around you are lots of non-therapy things that can support you, that can buoy you and help you back to your feet. Sometimes it’s friends or family. It could be a religious or spiritual community, or some other group whose members you resonate with. Maybe it’s a support group. Maybe it’s a knitting group. Maybe it’s a running club. Whatever they are, the supports are there, and often the outstretched hands they offer are enough to get you off the ground, to help you through a tumultuous time.
I see something else in the frame with you, too: I see that there are times when these other supports, the internal and external resources that are available to you, just aren’t enough. Despite all your wonderful capacity for striving, surviving, and thriving, there are times when you don’t feel like you’re thriving. Sometimes, it feels like you’ve been stuck for a really long time; even with all those resources you have, you can’t get all the way up off the floor, or can’t quite find your stride when you do.
“Despite all your wonderful capacity for striving, surviving, and thriving, there are times when you don’t feel like you’re thriving. Sometimes, it feels like you’ve been stuck for a really long time; even with all those resources you have, you can’t get all the way up off the floor, or can’t quite find your stride when you do. ”
This isn’t weakness: it’s human to need the support of others. And that’s what therapy offers you: skilled, personalized support when you need it, when for whatever reason your inner and outer strengths, together with all the supports that are around you, aren’t quite enough to get you up and keep you on your feet.
When you’re down, you feel so very vulnerable. For many of us, finding and opening up to a stranger isn’t easy in the best of times, and when we’re wounded or lost or overwhelmed, it can be an even scarier prospect. But the right therapist, when you find that person, knows that you are not your problems, that those problems are part of your story, part of your life, but there is so much more to you than the problems. The right therapist offers you the compassion you need and deserve so that you can find the healing capacity that’s already in you. That person offers you calm and curiosity and helps you to access the calm and curiosity in yourself, so that you can better see what’s going on around you and within you. So that you can find the places where change and care and healing are needed; so that you can bring courage and hope to those places that need it and deserve it.
