As a counsellor and psychotherapist offering in-person as well as online therapy, I’m understandably focused on wanting to help clients to see them get the outcomes they seek.
So right up front, I feel compelled to offer these two points to potential clients straight away.
I work with a lot of people in relieving anxiety and depression, people who feel they have lost their way in life, lost their sense of purpose, lost any connection to a deeper meaning in their lives and just feel like they are trudging through their days. It’s painful for them and for me.
If you want help, it’s good to know how to be helped. And overwhelmingly that comes down to you. There is no other way.
Strap yourself in here because the sort of honest discussion around this topic requires exactly the same crucially honest approach that people seeking mental health support need to bring to the table. And as you might’ve guessed, the lack of a willing honesty is the other biggest factor that sometimes leads to clients feeling shortchanged, like therapy “didn’t work” or even, God forbid, their counsellor didn’t know how to help.
The dilemma for the client is two-fold. And no way is my intention in discussing these points here designed to shame or belittle people needing mental health help.
We go to the dentist without the same expertise as a dentist. We go in as amateurs, unaware. It’s the same with psychotherapy. We’re new to the game and we simply don’t know what we don’t know. Likewise, unless there’s some sort of intervention – as this article on the subject aims to be – we can’t know the most helpful ways to maximise the benefits from counselling and therapy, and how to improve the chances of actually getting the help we crave.
The two things a client needs to develop within themselves for therapy to be successful are a tender yet ruthless honesty and an acceptance of the fact there’s no one coming to save you except yourself.
You have to be your own best friend. It’s not just about the financial investment in therapy. You have to invest the time and effort that getting free of suffering requires – because again, it’s not necessarily an easy or straightforward process.
This is difficult work if it is done properly. Getting free from suffering will ironically often create a sense of greater suffering at first because the work involves a confrontation with many things going on in our lives and within ourselves that we’ve avoided for many years.
That’s how we ordinarily “find peace” – through avoidance. But that’s a Band-Aid solution that doesn’t stick forever, and so the only option is to muster the courage and the willingness to do the work . . . or otherwise find comfort in new coping mechanisms.
It’s in this latter failure pattern that the majority of addictions have their root. It’s easier to open a bottle of wine or engage in promiscuity or take a bet on a football game or simply go to the refrigerator than it is to tackle a crisis head on. And some crises aren’t that obvious. We’ve made ourselves accustomed to them while they’ve been rolling on in slow motion in the background for years and years.
Quality of life is the first casualty of any mental health disturbance. In truth, quality of life is the only thing that really matters on this plane.
The majority of my clients don’t suffer specific mental health conditions, no matter how easily we could slap those labels on them.
I offer help for people caught in the suffering of the human condition. Certainly, that work often only brings people into my life – people who are finally ready to do the work – because of crisis. And crisis intervention with a skilled therapist is definitely an area where I have the best results, bringing relief and a rapid sense of peace and okayness to people who really feel on the edge of the abyss.
There is such a thing as short-term relief for mental health issues. I get feedback from my clients that finally finding someone who can hear and understand and be with them in their pain, misery and heartbreak offers a degree of immediate relief. But in my pledge to bring that total honesty to you as well, I also have to say that short-term relief is just another Band-Aid. It’s battlefront triage. It’s getting you safe and secure enough to do the actual work.
Successful psychotherapy will challenge any client. My approach is also rooted in the Buddhist, Taoist and Stoic understandings that our ego does not like to be challenged. Oh no.
And that’s again where honesty comes in, having to front up to the many ways we have been directly complicit in our own suffering.
When a skilled therapist starts leading you through the difficult work of unpicking the mind and ego’s role in the life difficulties it has helped produce, it’s very easy to go to defence or rejection or even blame towards the therapist, friends and family, romantic partners, workmates and the world. Basically, it is easier – and it’s in the interest of the ego protecting itself – to go into victim-oriented thinking rather than face uncomfortable truths.
I’m here to tell you there’s no chance of getting some distance, peace and clarity without crossing that boundary.
So again, that’s where honesty and willingness come in.
With the proviso that we should always be our own best friend, how would you tenderly and warmly guide yourself towards undertaking a full confrontation with everything you’ve so far avoided?
And how would you keep yourself in that uncomfortable space when every instinct screams at you to run, to get free, to get safe, to go back to your comfort zone – the place in which these troubles you experience inevitably arise again?
It’s only in a warm and willing okayness to feel that distress – even welcoming it as a necessary stage in the healing process – that we can commit to therapeutic work and in so doing give ourselves the chance to be one of the ones who gets something out of therapy.
And only you can do that. Only you can offer that to yourself. Only you can be your own best friend.
Only you can rescue you. Only you can turn the tide. Only you can be your own best friend and lead yourself into the light of awareness through willingness, self-awareness and honesty.