If you’re struggling right now but still on the barrier of therapy– assuming it is for people with more serious mental problems, symptoms or disorders health conditions than what you are facing – I would like to challenge you to reject this hypothesis.
Even as a health editor who wrote about Mental Health to make a living, I felt like therapy was for other people, such as people who were having difficulty functioning in their daily lives, missing work, not getting out of bed, or being sidelined by symptoms. So I waited until things got to this point before finally seeking therapy, and I really wish I hadn’t.
“Much of psychotherapy is focused on helping people move on from a crisis, deal with trauma, or deal with a serious mental illness,” says a licensed psychologist. Ryan Howes, Ph.D., tells SELF. “But what many people don’t realize is that we are also trained not only to make a bad life better, but also to make a good life.”
Although the stigma around mental health seems to have largely dissipated in recent years (which on social media is not it talk about their anxiety or ADHD?), this misconception that therapy is only for certain people or certain levels of suffering persists. But research, experts, and real patients like me tell a different story: You don’t need to cross an imaginary threshold to justify and benefit from therapy. And it’s certainly not stupid or self-indulgent to seek therapy to help you deal with whatever seems too big in your life, whether it’s your family, your job, your relationship, your health, your stress level or anything else. inexplicable feeling that you can’t really shake.
So if you’re looking for a reason to finally try therapy yourself, here are a few that might help.
For starters, therapy works.
I know the enthusiasm with which people in therapy suggest therapy to everyone around them (as if it were as inevitable as Succession) maybe… a lot. But there is concrete evidence of its effectiveness. In 2012, the American Psychological Association published a resolution on the effectiveness of psychotherapywhich pulled together the body of research on the subject and concluded that therapy is beneficial for treating a range of mental and behavioral issues, and that these effects last well beyond your time on the couch.
