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Holidays Getting You Down?
Six common therapy misconceptions that may be keeping you away from needed treatment
The holiday season often evokes in us complex and difficult feelings, leading people to seek out a therapist just before or just after it. In a past post, I wrote about cultural forces like insurance companies and quick-fix promises that make it difficult for those suffering emotionally and psychologically to get effective therapy. I was pleasantly surprised that many people — friends and strangers — reached out to express wanting a therapy of depth, relationship, and insight like that described in the essay.
But they echoed concerns that I’ve heard from many patients over the years. It’s worth dispelling some of the most common fears about these therapies so that they don’t stand in the way of a good treatment.
- Therapy is about blaming parents.
The biggest misunderstanding maybe is that therapy absolves the patient of personal responsibility and instead blames parents. In fact, an effective therapy aims for the opposite. It’s true, many therapists believe one’s early caregivers have a huge impact on who we are in relationships today.
Some of the many things we learn from those relationships are: how we elicit care, what we can expect from others, our willingness to trust, our sense of how to act when someone is angry with us, what of our own anger can be tolerated, how we perceive ourselves, our experience of succeeding and failing, how we manage envy and being envied, and so on. But therapy helps us work through the difficult relationships and our perceptions of poor or unfair treatment, of feeling hurt, dismissed, misunderstood, unloved.
And yes, with these memories and experiences come anger, sadness, guilt, shame, and a host of other feelings that may be connected with parents. For real and lasting change, a person must grapple with these insights about the past, and ultimately take responsibility for the troubling behaviors that grew out of it. In a good psychotherapy, the helpless sorrow we often feel is replaced by problem-solving.
2. Therapy is self-indulgent.
Therapy is indeed about acknowledging our needs and desires, but not to encourage selfishness…
