Should You See a Therapist?
By Jim Rue
In a short story by James Thurber, "A Unicorn in the Garden", a man tells his wife there is a unicorn in their garden eating flowers. Without looking outside she tells him there can't be. Unicorns don't exist. The man goes outside and looks again. He comes back and repeats his assertion. His wife, still without getting up, says to him "You're a booby . . . and I'm going to have you put in the booby hatch."
Don't you just hate it when this happens to you? It probably didn't happen just like it did in the Thurber story. There just aren't that many boobies in the world and you are probably not one of them. Anyway, Thurber had an outmoded attitude about women.
Trouble in Shangri-La
Maybe instead, someone, a co-worker or family member, angrily said to you, "You really should see a counselor" just before slamming the door. Or maybe he or she took a gentler, more compassionate approach, sitting with you there on the couch and talking slowly and quietly to you. But maybe it occurred to you that the words were pretty much the same. Maybe it was you who slammed the door.
What a frightening prospect counseling can be! Even though, maybe things haven't been going that well otherwise, either… maybe your grades suck. Maybe you have been feeling lethargic and totally lacking in energy. Maybe you have even been thinking about suicide. Maybe you've lost a job, or maybe it is clear to everyone including you that you are doping or drinking far too much. Maybe you have a recurring thought or dream that is interfering with your ability to move happily though the world.
You may not be aware of anyone around you who is in therapy, but you can be assured they are there. They are your friends and co-workers. People don't often talk it up when they start counseling, but that doesn't make therapy a bad thing. The difficulties that give you a final push toward psychological counseling may not be details of your life that you wish to share with everyone. And the truths you reveal may turn out to be far more surprising and liberating than you could ever have imagined.
It's not much help, perhaps, when someone says to you, "Don't be afraid." When has that statement ever really helped anyone to become unafraid? But the fear of counseling, while natural enough, shouldn't hold you back.
Everyone Needs It Sometime
The fact is that virtually everyone has some time in his or her life when psychological counseling is called for, or even urgently needed. It is not a sign of weakness. The end of one of your primary relationships, the ending of a job or loss of a prized possession, an arrest, a health challenge or major disappointment, or even a sort of general malaise that is preventing you from achieving what you want may be more than enough for you to reach a conclusion that you can benefit from a psych. It has to be you to make the choice to go. Otherwise your time is wasted.
People get counseling for many reasons. Sometimes, at the top level, they go to have their biases confirmed, or to amass a body of evidence that they are more right about something than some adversary is. Students, or others who feel like their lives are in transition, go for help from a dispassionate observer in making a difficult or important life decision. Sometimes people spend time with counselors in order to uncover deep-seated beliefs that have been holding them back.
What Have You Been Pretending Not to Know?
You might resist seeking counseling because you will fear that you will discover some dark secret about yourself, or worse, that everyone around knows something about you that you do not. The truth is that counseling can indeed assist us in revealing truths about ourselves that we had been previously unable to access. But it is equally true that we are bound to be better off once we are in conscious possession of that knowledge than we were when it was subconsciously controlling us.
You might grouse at having to 'pay a friend' to listen to your problems. That's where training comes in. A good psychologist will be a good listener. He or she will know when to listen, and will know when it is more beneficial to say, "Now wait a minute…"
There are many good reasons to go for therapy, and only a few good reasons not to. Another article found here offers tips on how to pick a good one. It is only slightly harder than picking the best watermelon in the produce section.
Find a Way to Reframe the Problem
Regardless of whom you pick, you will gain the best benefit possible for yourself from the money spent if you can attend carefully to what happens in sessions, earnestly seeking ways to regard the issues of your life from a new perspective. Maybe there truly is no one at all to blame for your circumstance - maybe not even you.
