Brutal lessons from therapy
Towards the tail end of 2017, I decided to give psychotherapy a shot for two reasons:
- I was genuinely intrigued by the whole process of a mental health professional having a shot at giving insights into my burning questions by leveraging psychology.
- It was an experiment of sorts, and I really felt like engaging in it, considering it was related to two areas that I have always been interested in: mental health & psychology.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t facing any mental issues, and I don’t want anyone to think it was just an experiment. It was definitely an effort towards giving importance to self care, and I was obviously rewarded, but not in ways that I had imagined.
Met my therapist for the first time post work, and she shot an open question to me:
“What are your intentions behind coming for therapy?”
I immediately responded about the dilemma that I was facing with respect to the career that I wanted to pursue for a longer duration. I was working in the corporate sector for a while by then, and I was beginning to develop an aversion for it, and I obviously wanted to address it.
She set a date for our first session, and I showed up excited as I was going to get answers to if not all questions, at least to the most fundamental ones. I soon realized my conceptions were way off the mark, and therapy was radically different from what I had gathered.
- There are no quick solutions. As a generation that is hardwired to instant gratification, we are all on the lookout for that band-aid solution that can magically turn off our problems quickly. Therapy is a demanding activity, and you need to work in full cooperation with the therapist to help you mine out the causative agents for whatever is bothering you. My therapist followed the psychoanalytic methodology, and it meant rewinding all the way back to a time in my childhood that I could recollect, and work from. It was mentally exhaustive and painful, considering I had to relive some of the events from that time. When I started experiencing pain, I began to trust the process of therapy, because release of some of those suppressed content was alleviating tension.
- Subject yourself to extremely difficult questions. My therapist would shoot some really good questions, and we wouldn’t move on unless I had given a convincing answer. I remember tackling just one question for an entire session, and how cathartic I felt towards the end when I figured out the answer. We all tend to run away from some of the difficult questions in life as we unconsciously believe long-term suffering is better than short-term pain.
- We hugely discount our victories. As I had already mentioned, therapy took me through really painful phases of my childhood, and in the process of combating pain during that time, the defense mechanism that I had developed didn’t give any space for appreciating my victories. It felt good to return to my laurels, and taste it again in its entirety.
- We are experts in playing ourselves. In an effort to avoid the short-term pain, the kind of garbage that we sell ourselves is just ridiculous. At one point of time, I couldn’t believe that I fed my mind certain logic that just didn’t make any sense. We are so good at selling ourselves with ideas that convince ourselves that the best solution is to take the path of least resistance.
- It is okay to cry. I had recently written a piece about being okay with crying, and I believe the conditioning for it happened after I went for therapy. As an alpha male, I am constantly in the pursuit of dominating and ruling every situation. In the past, if at all I came across any emotions, I used to sweep it under the carpet by tagging it as not being manly. I am now an alpha male who tries to embrace his emotions whenever possible.
- Importance of focus. As my therapist took me through my past, she pointed out how I have consistently jumped from one thing to another, and I wasn’t ready to see things through completion because of certain mental traps that had developed as part of my defense mechanism to combat whatever life had thrown at me. I haven’t completely mastered this, but I have definitely taken baby steps.
Time with my therapist was cut short since I moved out of the city, and few things still remain to be addressed. That being said, I was able to make a significant shift in my attitude with those 10+ sessions solely because I was downright honest with my therapist, and was ready to do the work. I am sure I would have reaped more if I had continued, but that’s a different problem altogether.
Personally, I feel therapy is a good step towards self care, and you would definitely go through a transformation if you are ready to do the plumbing work in those clogged pipes of your mind!
If you liked the above piece, hit the CLAP button below.
