Convincing myself (and people exactly like me) to do therapy
Convincing myself (and people exactly like me) to do therapy
What I wish I knew earlier to de-stigmatize taking care of my mental health
Disclaimer: I am not a therapist. I am not any sort of mental health professional. I am a 20 year old SWE who is very much still figuring out life. This post is not advice. I wrote this and all my other posts for people who are “exactly like me”.
I recently started seeing a therapist. I wanted to/thought I should for a long time but was resistant for tons of reasons. I thought that some/most of these reasons might apply to lots of my friends, who might tend to overthink, rationalize or attempt to self-regulate their problems away. They might even apply to folks who seem perfectly well-adjusted to most people, who can successfully self-regulate, and generally feel comfortable with their lives.
The epitome of why people like me should do therapy hit me in the face in my 2nd session. My therapist said:
Aadil I have good news for you. Your problem is not cognitive, it’s emotional.
And I was like:
Fuck.
I’ve always been pretty logical. I thought that all of my problems had logical solutions. Lonely? Talk to strangers, reach out to friends often, there’s actions I can take to alleviate that. Sad? Work out, go for a walk, etc. I thought I could outthink my problems — that’s why, when my therapist said my problems were emotional, I didn’t take it as good news. Cognitive problems can be solved with cognition, which I’m supposed to be good at. I don’t know where to start when it comes to emotional problems — that’s why I’m in therapy.
If I knew that before, I would’ve started working on my emotional problems a lot sooner. And the reason I took so long was that I was rationalizing my problems away instead of trying to face them.
Most of my reasons to not get a therapist were based on misconceptions:
Misguided Reason Not to Get a Therapist #1: Therapists don’t actually care about you. They get paid to listen to you rant for an hour and then they’re done. They just wait out the hour — they don’t actually care to understand you.
My Experience:
My therapist immediately made it clear that we would have absolutely no relationship outside the sessions — he’s not even allowed to say hi if he sees me on the street. So it’s true that they are there just for the hour. The thing is, his conversational memory/ note-taking is way too good for me to believe he doesn’t actually try to understand/care about me. If he’s faking it, he’s doing an incredibly good job to the point where I don’t notice. I’ve already told him things I’ve told no one and truly don’t feel judged even a little — something I’ve literally never experienced before. (I thought I did but I didn’t.)
He also never puts thoughts in my head — he waits for me to speak fully and then prompts with questions or we run exercises. If he was faking, the prompts and exercises wouldn’t feel as helpful. And considering the process for becoming an accredited therapist, it feels like this level of care and attention is the rule, not the exception.
Misguided Reason Not to Get a Therapist #2: I don’t even know what I’d talk about. I’m doing great right now, nothing’s wrong.
My Experience:
Therapy is a place where you get a free place to talk about your favourite topic: yourself. And if you think you’re not self-centered, that it’s hard to talk about yourself — you’re just acclimated to social climates where humility is a desirable quality to signal high status. Your therapist harbours no such preconceptions about status (hopefully). And if it truly makes you uncomfortable to talk about yourself, that’s great! Sometimes my therapist intentionally guides me towards making myself uncomfortable and sit with it. Experiencing and observing negative emotions in a safe, controlled manner has actually been a great way to diminish them - who knew?
Finally, if you’re still worried, your therapist is literally a professional conversation-haver and listener — it’s literally their job to get you to talk about yourself. I was scared at first because I thought their job was to point out my flaws. It’s actually closer to creating a safe space for me to explore my emotions. flaws and self-doubt and then maybe resolve them myself.
I started therapy at a time where I felt better than I had in several months. And I think the reason for that was I wasn’t strong enough to do it at my lowest points. There’s never really a bad or good time to start — the effects of therapy are downstream on your entire life. It won’t necessarily increase the good times but maybe make you enjoy them more. Or reduce the bad times but it might make them feel not as bad. It’s not a create or delete, it’s not all or nothing — it’s an update with a small percentage multiplier.
Misguided Reason(s) Not to Get a Therapist #3: It’s too expensive. $200 an hour are you kidding?! That’s like 15 hours of min. wage. And it’ll take so long to find a therapist I like. And what cadence am I even supposed to do for sessions? They’re incentivized to make me do more ‘cause that’s how they get paid so I can’t trust their judgement.
My Experience:
True, but first check your private insurance provider if you have one (you might be surprised, I was). Second, taking care of immediate needs like food/water/shelter i.e. money is probably going to have more of an outsized impact on your life than therapy anyway, if that’s where you’re at. Talking about your problems won’t solve them if they’re basic need related. I’m moreso targeting people who can actually afford it but use it being expensive as a blanket excuse (me). Don’t be like me and misrepresent what you can’t afford with what you don’t want to do. Try looking for a therapist with a no-cost initial consultation for an even lower barrier to entry.
Honestly yeah, finding a therapist you like might be really hard. I feel like I got lucky — I gelled with my therapist right away on the first try. But the friends I’ve talked to about therapy also somehow got lucky and got along with their first therapist and from the one’s who didn’t I noticed some patterns. So to maximize your chances, try:
Using a matching service — I found cpeh.ca on reddit by going down a rabbithole of therapists in Toronto and finding them on reddit, see if there’s something like it in your city or use CPEH, they have virtual appointments (which is what I do even though I live in the city), you fill out an intake form, intake call, then they match you with some therapists and you can pick
Ask your family doctor for a recommendation (if you like them) — had this work well for a friend
Maybe controversial but pick someone that looks like you — I picked a guy cause I felt like he’d just understand me better, same with some other friends, most/all the women I know have female therapists (but I also picked him because his bio seemed more relevant to me so YMMV, also especially true if you’re some sort of disadvantaged minority and your issues stem from this)
My therapist recommended weekly for the first month to build up rapport, then bi-weekly after, then maybe once a month or ad-hoc when I feel like I need it. Of course he’s biased but I really do think he cares for me and I think most therapists do. Even friends I have who want to be social workers/therapists/are interested in psych are genuinely kind and caring and have a personal investment behind it — they want to help people who struggle like they do and understand why it happens.
I kind of came to the same conclusion after thinking about it — I kind of think of my therapist as a personal trainer for my mind. After a while, I should have all the requisite knowledge and enough practice to work out by myself (which likely will take the form of meditation and journalling for me but with prompts from therapy) just like learning proper form and routines from a PT. And it’s not like I see a final destination with therapy — just like my body, working out my mind will be a constant activity throughout my life and I’ll never be done.
“But this is entirely your experience! It wont be the same for me, you just got lucky.”
True. But would it really be so bad to try it? To believe that there is someone out there to help you become everything you ever wanted to? To help you stop you from holding yourself back? And if that’s not enough, if you truly are driven by logic, why not try it just so you can say your conclusions are based on actual data? ‘Cause right now you’re just making things up in your head — a theory isn’t valid unless it’s falsifiable, go try and prove yourself wrong first.
What really convinced me (and my mom) was analogizing therapy to a windshield wiper for the mind. Thoughts just build up and you just need to get them all out. Which makes it especially important for people who have heavy storms of thoughts happening all the time. Even in light rain, it’s better to run the wiper once — you don’t just use it in storms since you want to keep your vision clear all the time. If your brain is clouded with thoughts, you won’t be able to steer yourself to success (bars).
Side Note:
Talking/ranting to friends doesn’t necessarily accomplish that wiper effect because often you’re somewhat reserved around them or they don’t fully listen/understand. Most people literally aren’t built for what therapists do or what other people need because they’re primarily concerned with their own needs.
I even delayed therapy every step of the way once I’d decided to do it. After my intake form, I took a week to book the intake call. After I got matched, I waited another week to pick a therapist and email them. After that, took 2 weeks to book my first session. I still haven’t even gotten to talking about how I think I might have ADHD cause I’m scared I might actually have it and the medication might take away my *sparkle* — getting a diagnosis for that from a therapist or otherwise could be life changing but even now I’m resisting. Yet pushing through and starting has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done.
It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done/practiced before. If life is a video game, doing therapy feels like a sandbox where it doesn’t feel like I’m improving at the game per se, but more like the game is reducing in difficulty the more time I spend in it. Because the sandbox doesn’t really contain the game but my perception of it, and the more I interact with and change my perception, the easier the real game becomes.
Learning to code makes coding easier, learning to play the video game made gaming easier— therapy just makes the whole world easier. Be it talking to other people, myself, even just existing — nothing else has come close to giving me the same feeling.
Anyway, highly recommend (if you’re exactly like me) :D
* Special thanks to Grace, Harpriya, Kasra and Rishi for reading drafts of this post.
** If you liked this post and want me to write more, consider buying me a coffee ☕️