I know it sounds like a cliché, but I never really thought about starting therapy. Truth to be told, a doctor told me it was necessary.
It was during my university years, I was dealing with a health condition that required both medical and surgical treatment. The doctor who was following my case strongly suggested that the psychological component of recovery was going to be as important as the physical one. He told me that it would become an integral part of the process, so he gave me the contact of a psychologist he had worked with before and trusted.
That was about ten years ago. Let me tell you, I remember the first phone call between me and her as if it had happened yesterday. I didn’t expect much, to be honest; I held no prejudice against psychology, but I didn’t think it would be useful in my case. Boy, was I wrong.
The following years (yes, years) changed the way I think, the way I relate to myself, and the way I understand other people. My mind will never be the same.
Table of Contents
The start of my journey
As I said, I expected absolutely nothing. I didn’t know how a therapy session worked, I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, I didn’t know how I would feel after talking about my problems. All I had while walking into the psychologist’s office for the first time was an open mind and a vague hope that my doctor was right in saying that it would be important.
The first thing that surprised me was the absence of judgement: I used to tell no one the most important details of my life, mostly because I had no one in my life to tell (a story I told in this article), but also because I was embarrassed about the sheer scale of my loneliness. For the first time in my life, I was in an environment where I could say everything freely without being judged or accused. Honestly, it was a shock.
This was much more important than you would expect. I was being cured for a problem I was born with, so its very existence was not my responsibility, but ignoring it for years was very much my decision, and I was criticized for that. The harshest of the critics was, of course, myself: I knew every little facet of the truth and I could analyze the mismanagement of my condition better than anybody else, and you can rest assured that my mind took full advantage of that. I thought of myself as nothing but a pathetic coward, the exact opposite of what a man should be (provided it is possible to define what a man should be). In her office there was no room for hard feelings: they were of no use, and were better left outside.
The results of some deep work
It’s impossible to summarize all that therapy has done for me. It’s way too much, way too complex and honestly I’m bound to forget something even if I take a long time to think about it.
Some things, though, are very important and cannot be omitted. The first one I want to talk about is that now I take nothing for granted. Never. My reactions to things that happen, other people’s reactions, even the nature of my relationships; nothing is set in stone, and to be fair, it’s better this way.
I also learned that every person contains multiple parts that interact with each other. The part of me that wants to eat badly is not the whole of me. The part that struggles with social connection is not the whole of me. Understanding this made it possible to work with those parts instead of simply fighting them or identifying with them.
I learned to forgive — myself at first, but also others. This also sounds like a cliché, but it’s impossible to overstate its importance. Holding onto things that you can’t change is only going to bring further resentment, and that energy is better redirected elsewhere. Leave that pit of despair behind you, it won’t do you any good in the future.
And I learned understand the origins of my emotions. Not just “I feel bad” but “this specific situation produces this specific reaction because of this specific history”. That tracing doesn’t eliminate the reaction, but it makes it legible, and what is legible is workable.
Some threads are impossible to pull
Despite everything I said until now, therapy is not the one-size-fits-all solution for all your problems. I firmly believe some things can never be completely solved, but they can be worked on with such effectiveness that their negative effects become a small part of what they originally were. This is not a failure of therapy; our minds have limits, there are things that we can prevent before happening but once they happened they are a part of us, and won’t stop being so.
My relationship with food is the clearest example. I spent decades using food as pleasure, escape, and companionship, never primarily as fuel (which is what I should have done). That pattern started forming when my mind was taking its shape, and after the shape was consolidated it stayed right where it was. I’m now too old to change what I am in the deepest nature of my person, but I’m not too old to stop the parts of me that I don’t like from causing too much damage. I can still build a hell of a working shield. I may not be able to deform my mind as I please, but I can smooth the corners enough for it to help myself.
What I want you to know is this: therapy can produce extraordinary results on almost any problem. But “working on a problem” and “eliminating a problem” are different things. This doesn’t mean therapy is going to be useless on that, not at all; that’s still an incredibly useful instrument to use to our advantage. Just because a problem is impossible to eliminate completely, it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth making it manageable.
Prejudices are cringe
I’ve heard it a thousand times, surely you have, too. Therapy is a sign of weakness, yadda yadda.
Let’s cut it short: therapy is not a weakness, therapy is a response to a weakness that is already there. If you want to do something about it, that is.
Examining your own patterns, sitting with difficult truths about yourself, working to change what can be changed — this requires more courage than pretending the problems don’t exist. When you’ll find yourself lying in your bed the night after a session, thinking again and again about what you’ve discovered that day, admitting that you’ve uncovered some harsh reality about yourself, that’s probably the moment in which you’re at your strongest. That’s what it’s all about.
You don’t even need to have a specific problem to start going to therapy. You can go to a therapist simply to understand yourself better — to map your own interior more accurately, to have a space where your thoughts get examined rather than just experienced. The understanding of your own emotions is a pursuit noble enough to be worth the start of a therapy journey.
Where am I now
Unsurprisingly, I’m still in therapy, although now it’s a completely different journey. The health problem that brought me there in the first place is kind of solved (it can’t actually be solved, it was just mitigated a lot), but my mind is pulling some crazy shenanigans with my self esteem and relations with others. I went through several years without contact with my therapist, but I contacted her again when I felt the need to do so. I’m not ashamed of that and I’m not planning to be.
Before you start
What would I tell somebody who wants to go to therapy? The most important practical piece of advice that nobody would give you: not every therapist will be right for you.
There’s no shame in trying a therapist for a while and then changing your mind, even the therapist will tell you that. If you find out that you’re not satisfied with how it’s going, then make a change. It will be worth it, trust me.
The second thing: go in with your mind as open as possible. Be prepared to have long-held beliefs questioned — including beliefs about yourself that you’ve treated as simply true. Some of what you’ll discover will be uncomfortable. That discomfort is usually where the useful work is. When that happens, be glad it happened.
Therapy is not a passive experience. The sessions are one hour a week, but the real work happens in the other hundred and sixty-seven hours, when you take what you’ve examined and try to integrate it into actual life.
That integration is slow, but it does arrive. You have the power.