Do I Need Therapy?

If you’ve been feeling stuck or dissatisfied with your life, you may have asked yourself this question. Maybe someone in your life (a sibling, a friend, an ex-partner) told you that you “need therapy.” The answer to whether you could benefit from therapy will vary depending on who you ask. If you feel dissatisfied with life on a regular basis, therapy can help. Therapy could benefit you if you are stuck in psychological suffering or you have run out of ideas or energy to improve your life.

Can Mental Health Improve Without Therapy?

Absolutely. Will most people feel better without therapy eventually? Yes. People are resilient. Most people heal from psychological stress, but psychological healing happens more quickly and often more fully with therapy.

How Does Therapy Help?

Therapy helps people process their difficult life experiences in a healthy way. Whether you’re in the midst of a stressful experience or still feeling its impact weeks, months, or years later, therapy can help. Therapy helps people notice where they are getting stuck and helps them learn ways to move forward. People often get stuck in emotional suffering when their internal dialogue fixates on regrets or “shoulds” related to past negative experiences. Continuously searching for ways to prevent future emotional pain can also interrupt the healing process.

Therapy Encourages Healthy Coping

Mental health and physical health interventions work in similar ways.  If you break your leg, it will likely heal on its own eventually without involving a doctor. However, it will probably take longer (maybe a lot longer) to heal and may still cause you pain weeks, months, or years after the healing is over if you do not seek medical care. Getting professional help minimizes the healing time and maximizes your chances of regaining full functioning of your leg.

Similarly, not getting psychological help when you need it can slow down recovery and put you at risk of getting stuck somewhere in the healing process. However, if you get the help you need, when you need it, the healing will often be faster and fuller than if you had recovered on your own. The faster and more fully you heal, the sooner you can get you back to enjoying life.

Therapy Reduces Emotional Suffering

Therapy can be a powerful resource for coping with intense psychological stress and healing from lingering emotional pain from past experiences. Let’s talk about therapy in the context of an emotion we all deal with eventually: grief. Imagine you experience the death of a beloved pet. First, you feel sad; you miss them. Of course you do. Separation from a loved one is painful. Pain is an unavoidable part of life that tells you the relationship was important to you.

Now imagine you start to wonder if you did something to contribute to their death. You may start to ask yourself ‘Did I miss early signs of an illness?’ or ‘Should I have fed them higher quality food?’ You may start to consider ways you could have made their lives better or appreciated them more. Maybe you should have spent more quality time with them, trained them better, or let them spend more time with other animals or people. Now you feel sadness and guilt.

Getting stuck in these thoughts could prolong your grief far beyond the time you would have felt the grief and sadness without the self-imposed guilt trip.  You may even avoid getting another pet because you feel like you won’t treat them well, don’t deserve another pet, or can’t handle the pain of loss again. This could deprive you of the joy of having a pet (and the joy they could have gotten from you) for years to follow.

The pain of loss is unavoidable, but the pain of suffering from the “what-ifs” and “should haves” is. Therapy can prevent you from getting stuck in these common negative thinking pitfalls. Therapy helps you learn strategies to manage the normal pain of life, while minimizing unnecessary suffering.  Doing so will give you more time and energy to do the things you enjoy and value.

When is Therapy the Most Helpful?

Therapy can be helpful almost any time you are experiencing psychological stress. When you seek therapy may influence how long it lasts and the focus of sessions. During a significant stressor, therapy will probably focus on helping you differentiate healthy from potentially problematic thoughts, processing your feelings, seeking or building support from those who are important to you, and taking care of your physical and emotional wellbeing. Therapy during a stressful experience focuses on caring for yourself and preventing the development of unhelpful coping habits that could get in the way of the healing process.

If your struggle with negative thoughts and feelings has been happening a long time, therapy will probably focus on identifying where you got stuck, getting unstuck, and repairing any problems that have happened as a result of being stuck for a prolonged period of time. The end goal of therapy is always the same- to minimize unnecessary psychological suffering and maximize your satisfaction with and enjoyment of life.

What are Some Attributes of “Good” Therapy?

• Goal-focused: You and your therapist should have an agreed upon goal or goals. This ensures that the therapeutic process focuses on improvements in the areas that are most important to you.
• Therapeutic Alliance: This is a fancy phrase for how you and your therapist get along. Do you feel like you are on the same page, working toward the same goal? Do you feel like they “get” you and provide helpful tools and suggestions or a way to process your experiences more healthily?
• Observable Progress: Do you seem to be getting anywhere? After several weeks to months of therapy, you should begin to feel some relief. If this is not happening, an explicit conversation about goals and approaches could help you maximize your therapeutic gains.

How Long Should Therapy Last?

This is a tricky one. Some people experience noticeable benefits from therapy in just a few sessions. Others require one or more “courses” of therapy. A course of therapy typically consists of weekly sessions for 12-26 weeks. It may take longer for someone who has experienced many psychological stressors and traumas to maximize their benefit from therapy. However, there should still be noticeable periods of relief and progress in coping with life stressors relatively quickly (weeks to months, rather than years). For most people, therapy will eventually be episodic or “as needed.” A common phrase in the therapy world is “the goal of therapy is to end therapy.”

No matter how many stressful experiences you have had, you do not have to suffer for the rest of your life, nor will you need therapy indefinitely. Healing is possible with the right support. Human beings are strong and resilient, and so are you.

Where Do I Start?

There are many self-help resources that can be a good place to start. Below are a few that are based on scientifically proven therapies:

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
  • Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life by Steven Hayes, PhD
  • The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris, MD
  • The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety by John P. Forsyth, PhD and Georg H. Eifert, PhD
  • The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression by
    by Kirk D. Strosahl PhD, Patricia J. Robinson, PhD
  • Living Beyond Your Pain: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Ease Chronic Pain by Joanne Dahl, PhD and Tobias Lundgren, MS
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy
  • DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets by Marsha Linehan, PhD, ABPP
  • The Dialectical Therapy Skills Workbook by Matthew McKay, PhD, Jeffrey Wood, PsyD and Jeffrey Brantley, MD
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
  • Mind Over Mood by Dennis Greenberger, PhD and Christine Padesky, PhD
  • The Comprehensive Insomnia Workbook: A comprehensive Guide to Getting the Sleep You Need
• Mindful Self-Compassion
  • The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook: A Proven Way to Accept Yourself, Build Inner Strength, and Thrive by Kristin Neff, PhD and Chris Germer, PhD
  • The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions, by Chris Germer, PhD

If you would like to learn more about how therapy can help with specific concerns, you may find my blog posts on recovery from traumatic experiences, insomnia, or relationship problems helpful. I have also written about how emotions work (here and here), which can help shift your perspective in ways that can help you get unstuck.

What If I Want or Need Professional Support?

A therapist trained in evidence-based therapy, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can help you figure out how to change your perspective and behavior to improve the quality of your life.

When you are searching for professional support to help you get back to enjoying life, I would be honored to be your guide. I help people identify and pursue a path to a better life. Contact me below for a free, no obligation intro call. I offer individual therapy and couple therapy.