Is Therapy Right for You?

Deciding to come to therapy can be hard. Often times you may feel afraid to talk to a stranger about the deepest darkest secrets of your life, you may be afraid of talking about emotions in general, or you may fear judgment will come (from the therapist) if you divulge a particular aspect of your life. In this article, we will discuss some of these fears – and what you may be able to do to resolve them – and we’ll discuss tools to decide if therapy is the best option for you!

Often therapists joke that anyone can benefit from therapy! The question really becomes: do the reasons why you might want to come to therapy involve issues that are interfering with your ability to function in some aspect of your life (mental/physical spiritual; home/marriage/work/school; etc.)? Often, we identify problems in our lives, but we may not work on them to change them because we cannot find strong enough motivation. This doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you if you find yourself not changing a problem – on the contrary, this identifies that the problem isn’t interfering with your life enough (yet) for you to have the motivation to change it…NBD!

The bigger problem may come in if you feel that you really want to make a change, and you may even want to talk to someone about those desires (and what gets in the way), but you may have fear about talking to a third party about your emotions. Many people have that fear! In fact, most new clients coming into counseling for the first time seem to present with some level of hesitation about spilling their deepest, darkest secrets. Like most things in life, when you start with something hard, it gets a little bit easier each and every day.

Opening up about feelings definitely seems to get easier as time goes on; if you list the top five things that you would like to talk about in therapy, order them on a scale from 1 to 5, and (perhaps) make each one a focus for each session. If you are doing weekly therapy, it will be about five weeks before you talk about the really hard thing – and if you’re doing biweekly sessions, it will be 2 1/2 months (roughly). Hopefully, this sort of ramping-up technique will help ensure your comfort by the time you get to the more difficult topics.

As far as judgment goes, no therapist (that’s worth his or her salt) ought to be judging his or her own clients. That being said, we all have preconceived biases (largely subconscious) that we carry into any given situation. Even counselors, who are trained to recognize and let go of these biases, are not immune to these struggles. Although most therapists do have a few blind spots, most of us are trained to “check our biases at the door,” and so if you find yourself on the receiving end of potential judgment, it could be that your therapist is subconsciously biased in someway (and you may want to address it with the therapist, and/or find another counselor). It could also be that if this has been a particular repetitive cycle in your life, an alternative explanation may not be that the therapist is responding in judgment but that you may be superimposing the idea of judgment onto yourself (because of deep-rooted fears of being judged, for example).

If general, if fear of judgment is the case, you may want to continue to give therapy a chance – even perhaps with the same therapist – while talking openly about fears of judgment (and even perceived judgments) coming from the counselor. With this open and honest approach, hopefully, you and the therapist can explore why those fears have developed in the first place and work towards developing healthier ways of looking at life situations in the future.