Before starting my Masters, I was interviewing folks in different fields to determine which jobs would fit me well. One friend, himself a psychotherapist for a few years, told me that school taught him very little relative to his practical experience. He gave a pretty strong ratio. Something like 80% of what he needed to know, he learned only after he started.
I’m only in my first 3 months of internship at the time of writing, so I’ll have to get back to you on how accurate he was. Whether you’re considering therapy for yourself or thinking of entering the mental health field for work, here are four things to know about therapy.
80% of Therapy is Done at Home
This is another statistic I cannot confirm, sad to say.
Some call therapy “working on you” – others “mental health hygiene.”
I like both of those phrases, and they capture an important truth: in therapy, most of the work is done by you, not your therapist.
This is somewhat counterintuitive at first. Isn’t the professional, the one you’re paying, supposed to do the work? Wouldn’t that make the most sense?
In fact, most helping professionals can only do so much.
Your doctor can prescribe meds or give health advice, but only you can take the meds and follow the advice. Even after major surgery, they’re only taking you part way. You have to work to heal post-op, and you may have to adjust your lifestyle to make sure the surgery is not needed again.
Nurses, personal trainers, teachers, social workers… all of these professionals do great work, but at the end of the day, you are the one taking their help and making its effects multiplicative. In a way, helping professionals like therapists are catalysts… they accelerate and facilitate the change that you make happen.
Life Sucks Sometimes
A few weeks into my internship, I realized something obvious: No one was coming to me when life was good.
Like Riley from Pixar’s Inside Out, almost all of us are optimists as children. Everything is fun (though some things are surely scary).
But as life goes on, the many things that can go wrong often do. Friends hurt us, loved ones betray us, our bodies fail us, and bad luck finds us. Perhaps worst of all, we hurt ourselves and others in a myriad of ways, and then make things worse by beating ourselves up about it.
It’s no surprise, then, that happiness tends to follow a U-shaped curve. The average human’s happiness trends downward after the teen years. Only later in life does it tend to increase again.
Thankfully, meaningfulness is not the same as happiness. It’s healthier to choose the struggles of life you would be willing to shoulder than to chase highs. Being able to accept that will, ironically I think, set you up for more happiness as life goes on, since you’ll be investing in the long-term return of life rather than short-term relief.
If you’re going into a helping profession like therapy (or even if you’re not), just understand that you’ll have to be okay with constantly hearing about negative emotions and the events that trigger them. All the more reason to have your own life together and learn how to process emotions well.
There Is Great Power In Listening… And in Being Heard
It’s amazing what people will tell you if you just let them.
While there are times for interruptions (to clarify, to slow a session down, to refocus, etc), more often than many therapists are comfortable with, the best response is silence.
A nod of the head or a “hmm” is often all someone needs to feel comfortable and keep going. More often than not, they’ll be spilling stuff that surprises even them! And that’s some of the beauty of therapy. In life, often we don’t feel comfortable enough to share. Sometimes that’s just us and our insecurity, or our shame, or our ability to lie to ourselves. Other times it’s just because no one has really listened to us before.
A professional, bound to confidentiality, and who can really listen, is a powerful place to unlock doors that lead us deep into the heart. It can be a safe place to start speaking more openly and confidently about yourself, your feelings, and your life.
Listening to others inevitably leads to untold internal treasures. And perhaps even more so, the feeling of being heard is incredibly relieving and empowering.
People Suck at Feelings
As I mentioned, sometimes people need to be interrupted or refocused. One of the reasons is to stop them from going on about what happened and help them move to how it impacted them.
It’s often in emotions that we find the real gold. The content of life, after all, is often highlighted as significant by our emotions. This is a major function of emotions, and thus it is the job of the therapist to help the client dig up and understand those emotions and the significance of the events.
“Wow. X and Y really impacted me. I never realized.”
This creates epiphany moments and can help people become unstuck. Perhaps they’ve been struggling to know exactly what they want, and noticing parts of their emotional response helps them see just how much they want X or Y.
The body just seems to know when an experience and associated emotions have not been processed. It’s like an alert system. “Something brutal happened, and we have to figure it out so we know what to do next time, or what to avoid doing. Otherwise, we could be in grave danger.”
Anxiety, depression, and anger often follow, and we’re so clueless about our emotions that we don’t even see the connection.
One of the real pros of therapy is that you have a third party, a professional who can help you dig in and process, but also who can’t say anything to anybody. This creates a sense of freedom to share more honestly and deeply than they might be able to otherwise. There’s something about this environment that can help people open up and start to do the real emotional work that they’ve been delaying all their lives.
Again, catalysts.
While the above are things to know about therapy, you could employ them in real life. Take responsibility for working on yourself. Understand and accept that life isn’t always happy. Listen, but also speak your mind to people who listen. And listen to those body sensations that you don’t understand.
Maybe they’re trying to tell you something?
