My therapy life
Therapy……In some ways it’s a bit like childbirth, not in the sense of the endless hours of extricating pain or the unexpected delights that your body throws you in the following days, but in the sense that you feel like nobody tells you the truth.
Literally millions of people have been through the same experience, but nobody has seen fit to share a really honest account of the details. The warts and all (the tears and snot!) of therapy remain clouded in mystery.
Now with childbirth I get this to an extent. Having ‘enjoyed’ the experience myself I know that if I really said it like it was to too many people the population may die out. But therapy, well that’s different yes? We should want other people to know it’s a good thing, to be able to accept help, to be open about what’s going on for them, to have space to explore their feelings, work through trauma and find a better version of themselves.
But if you try to find information about what therapy is like from the perspective of the person receiving it, you’ll find scarce resources. The shelves of self-help books and ‘how to’ guides for budding and developing therapists are well stocked but nothing titled ‘What to expect when you’re therapized’ (I was playing on ‘what to expect when you’re expecting’, but badly!)
So it’s obviously OK to find out how you should help yourself, and easy to find out how to become (on paper at least) someone who helps people but not OK to find out what to expect when you swallow the brave pill and open yourself up to someone else.
I find it increasingly odd in this content rich world in which we live; blogs, vlogs Instagram stories where people share, not only their overnight soaked oat pictures, but their deepest thoughts and dreams that there is so little mention of people’s experiences in therapy.
So why?
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Is it too hard? Well yup, it’s hard when you say it all in a safe little room so why repeat it and put whatever ‘it’ is out there for the world to see.
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Are we embarrassed? Probably a bit, or a lot. However far our therapy ‘journey’ (sick bucket) has brought us maybe it’s still to hard to say that we got there with the help of therapy?
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Or are we scared? Aha fear, probably the greatest of all human emotions to engender action (or inertia). Scared of telling people we’ve had therapy, scared of saying what it was like, scared of saying that we needed someone, or something more than we could get from the people who love us.
And I’d happily raise my hand to all 3 to be honest. But it’s bollocks. Because actually, just like knowing what it feels like to have a watermelon evicted from my person, it would probably be beneficial (or at least interesting) for other people to know what therapy is like from the inside. It should also be interesting for therapists to hear what it can feel like when you sit in the other chair, and importantly, what it feels like when you leave the chair and return to the big bad world where your therapy is about as taboo as things get in a society that has remarkably few reservations left.
And so I'm going to try and change that by offering my honesty, my brutal truth and maybe, just maybe, a light smattering of humour here. Read the blogs, let me know your thoughts and your experiences and maybe we can start to break the taboo - just in this little corner of the internet anyway.
C