Dear Marina
I have decided, after a troubling year, to seek some therapy.
What can I expect from therapy?
What should I look for in a therapist?
When is a therapist not right for you?
Can I bring up any/everything in therapy, when does it become unproductive whining?
Is it realistic to have an agenda?
Can therapy really change me? Will I see productive results?? I have a good self awareness I think, I know I struggle with two key issues, anger control and being driven sometimes to the point of distraction. My anger control is my top priority, I am a momma and I need to be a responsible parent who is even and unscary (the direct opposite of my dad).
Dear Marina
I have decided, after a troubling year, to seek some therapy.
First off, that’s awesome. It was really hard for me to admit I needed to go to therapy. I probably wasted a year of my life being completely stressed out, trying to hide it from everybody when therapy helped me basically immediately. It takes a strong woman to admit when she needs help… although I may just be saying that because I had to do it. 🙂
What can I expect from therapy?
That’s a tricky question. You’re going to get as much out of it as you put into it, so if you’re willing to do the (sometimes extremely uncomfortable) things the therapist suggests you do, and you have a good therapist who is a good match to you, you’re going to get a lot out of it.
It’s not going to change you, fundamentally, though. Therapy, in my limited experience, is more of a light than a shovel. It just shows you where the shit is, not necessarily how to get rid of it. But knowledge is the first step, so it’s a good place to start.
What should I look for in a therapist?
Like-mindedness. They don’t have to agree with you on everything, but there are a few fundamentals you should ask about before you start work. I made the mistake of not asking my first therapist anything, and it turned out that she had some extremely old fashioned ideas about the importance of marriage, and that really didn’t go over well with me.
So pick the most important things in your life – for me it was non-marriage, 12 steps – and ask the therapist what they think. Their answer will likely be as innocuous as possible, but you can still learn from this. Even if it doesn’t tip you off to any radical issues, it will still give you a feel for them so you can see if you’d be comfortable talking to this person about intimate things.
When is a therapist not right for you?
Like I said, my first therapist was really not right for me. I tried to communicate with her, but there seemed to be a lot of misunderstanding going both ways for us. I’ve never dated, but I get the feeling that what I experienced is similar to when the first series of dates aren’t working out. We had widely different opinions on fundamental life things (marriage and the 12 steps, specifically) and we were bad at talking with each other.
Can I bring up any/everything in therapy, when does it become unproductive whining?
Yes, you can. It becomes unproductive whining when you stop feeling better about going to therapy.
Is it realistic to have an agenda?
It’s realistic to have a general agenda. I went in to deal with my mom issues, and ended up talking about inner-child management, which helped immensely with my mom issues, but also with so many other relationship issues I was having with people and with myself, as well as my idea of myself.
Can therapy really change me? Will I see productive results?? I have a good self awareness I think, I know I struggle with two key issues, anger control and being driven sometimes to the point of distraction. My anger control is my top priority, I am a momma and I need to be a responsible parent who is even and unscary (the direct opposite of my dad).
I don’t know that it will really change you. Before these last two years if you had told me that therapy can be productive for anyone, I would have laughed. I thought it was a waste of money and time, and (maybe despite it, or maybe because of my 12 step experience) people just needed to reach between their legs, grab their fucking balls and take care of what needed to be taken care of. But that kind of ‘man-up’ attitude really contributed to my suffering in the long run because I kept trying to power through my own brain, and it wasn’t working.
What therapy did for me, which was invaluable, was it shined the light of expertise into the darkness of my mental anguish. I’ve done a lot of work on myself, in fact, it’s been years of constant work through the 12 steps, and I really thought I knew my own mind. What I learned was, I do know my own mind, but I don’t know about the science of the thing, I’m not versed in the phenomenon of childhood trauma or abuse, no matter how much I look at my own experience, or even how many other people’s books I read about it. Even if I was a professional, a surgeon can’t work on herself.
The therapist, who had seen hundreds of people just like me, who was an objective observer, helped me to see what I was doing and not knowing I was doing, and then it was up to me to use the tools I already had, or the ones he told me about, to take care of that. Before therapy, I thought the concept of the inner child was complete bullshit. I even told people that my inner child was dead. And that was actually a lot of my problem. I went around trying so hard to look like I was a mature adult, that I locked that injured part of me away where it festered and started to infect my carefully crafted grown-up life.
There are things I never learned about being a grown up, not as a child, and not in the 12 steps, and not from watching or talking to other people. I’m trying to implement those things now that I know them. It would be very easy to dismiss everything the therapist helped me realize and go straight back to pretending to be invincible, because that’s far more comfortable than the things I’m trying to do now.