The 5 Reasons therapy or counseling is actually valuable for you!
Therapy or counseling is often under sold or over sold. When it’s under sold people say it’s just talking to someone and that helps you feel better. It’s much more complex than that with a well trained and experienced therapist. When it’s over sold it’s put inside of marketing language that says it will solve all your problems instantly: all of a sudden you’ll be great with money, relationships are a breeze, you feel balanced emotionally all the time and you find $20 in your pocket. Obviously that’s not right either. So what makes therapy or counseling actually valuable?
Therapy or counseling offers you a chance to feel seen and known.
Don’t under-estimate this. Feeling seen and known is important for everyone and it causes us to feel better. It helps our emotions to express and feel relieved. It helps us feel like we’re not an alien and that we’re not alone. It helps us feel connected. All of this moves us into a place where we can be ourselves more naturally.
Therapy or counseling offers you a chance to change the memories that are responsible for the automatic ways you interact with yourself and the world that are a problem for you.
Likely the brain mechanism at the core of any real change in therapy is something called, memory reconsolidation. When we go through something enough times or intense enough one time we remember it and our brain creates an automatic way to “adapt” to such a moment. This includes what emotions to feel, the meanings we make about ourselves and others, how to hold our body, what to do with our voice and our gaze, how intense to feel, what to do behaviorally, etc. This automatic thing becomes unconscious and then starts to control our lives around those situations or similar situations that still activate those automatic ways. Impacting those memories (whether they are memories we think or memories we just feel) causes new automatic ways to begin to be made.
Therapy or counseling offers you a chance to gain skills of self regulation.
This is not easy and a lot of therapies don’t teach this well enough. Knowing how to regulate your emotions and re-balance your nervous system is not intuitive to most. Learning this skills can change your life. In therapy we learn these skills both through education and practice together but also through the co-regulation of being with the therapist’s nervous system. Having a steady AND open person with you when you start to feel deeply helps you hold and manage your feelings better.
Therapy or counseling offers you the chance to learn about yourself.
Who doesn’t like to learn about themselves!? In therapy we come to know things about how we really feel or think or what desires we have that might be tough for us to come in touch with on our own or in our normal life. I can’t tell you how many times someone has said to me or I have said myself in my own therapy, “I am just realizing this right now as I say it…”. Would you rather be on auto pilot or know what you really want?
Therapy or counseling offers you the chance to make sense of your life.
There’s something calming to the brain when we can name what emotions we’re feeling, when we can put together a narrative that helps us make sense of why we feel the way we do or why we do what we do, etc. In therapy we work towards this often so your brain can calm down and be more present.