People seek therapy for all kinds of reasons, usually to address things like depression, anxiety, stress, grief, or trauma. But what do these words mean? Specifically, what do they mean for you in the context of your life story?
Here’s what these really look like life for people:
- “What’s the point? Nothing matters. I can’t even get my children to listen to me” (depression)
- “We’re all just dust on a rock in space” or “God doesn’t seem to care”. (depression)
- “Our [country/world] is falling apart. I need to [escape/do something]” (anxiety)
- “I was at a work event, and everything seemed fine, when suddenly my chest tightened, my heart was pounding, and I felt dizzy” (anxiety, panic)
- “My wife and I fight all the time. She won’t give me space after a long day of work, and keeps asking for these expensive things I can’t afford” (stress)
- “I don’t know. I haven’t done much besides work since his death. Why can’t I cry? What’s wrong with me?” (grief)
- “Whenever I see someone who looks like him my blood turns cold, like millions of little crystals forming in my body, and then I just need to get out” (trauma)
In each example above, a person’s distress has a unique story. Each statement gives a clue about a person’s past, present, and future. In other words, these are not meaningless symptoms. Each person suffers from real experiences that occurred in their life.
Psychotherapy does something that other treatments do not. It listens to understand, and through understanding, to cure. Sometimes, the cure is simply helping us handle what life gives us—the good, the bad, even the impossible.
How Psychotherapy is Different
Psychotherapy treats mental illness through human relationship and conversation.
This is not how western medicine works. The chemical model says you just have a chemical imbalance in your brain that a pill can fix. Genetics say you inherited a certain set of traits and that’s just how it is. Statistics, similarly, puts you in a category and assigns a probability to you. Behaviorism says you were rewarded for acting in a certain way and punished for acting in other ways, so you learned some maladaptive life strategies.
None of these are wrong, they’re just pieces of the story. The problem is when these forms of understanding become the only truth about who you are and why you act the way you do.
The western medical model of mental illness loves classifications. It wants to put things in neat boxes and offer a pill, a service, a solution. It’s motivation often comes from insurance companies who want to identify and treat symptoms in the shortest amount of time possible—often 8 weeks for manualized treatments. What such treatment approaches cannot answer are questions like why or what for?
Here are four things that differentiate psychotherapy from other fields which closely overlap with it, adapted from the work of James Hillman in Suicide and the Soul:
- Psychotherapy is not medicine: It’s not about extending life for as long as possible, often for no reason. Sometimes, it’s about helping us face and deal with death, mistakes, or limitations.
- Psychotherapy is not a hard science: It’s not about finding which ‘category’ you belong to and pretending this explains your symptoms or offers a one-size-fits-all solution, like a pill or treatment manual.
- Psychotherapy is not about social order: It’s not about making you a model citizen who does what you’re supposed to do. Sometimes, what you’re ‘supposed to do’ is what’s hurting you, and often the cure involves moving toward making real changes, first within yourself and then in the world around you.
- Psychotherapy is not theology: It isn’t about your relationship to God, confessing your sins, or understanding what’s going on at a cosmic scale. It’s about your relationship with yourself and others around you. It’s about learning how to live in this world, not another one. Psychotherapy should be a neutral place for you to explore yourself and your ideas about the world without judgement. (That said, I love religious and spiritual topics in therapy.)
What Psychotherapy Is
I believe that effective psychotherapy is neither a passive nor an active process, but both—a fluid interchange of understanding and intervention. Research shows that the main healing factor in psychotherapy is always the human relationship between therapist and client, regardless of the theoretical orientation of the practitioner. I often say to my clients: “trauma that occurred in a relationship must be healed in a relationship” (e.g., a healthy one). People need people to heal, and we talk our way toward healing.
The last point I’d like to make is that you are the subject of psychotherapy. Not you as your depression or your anxiety or what’s happened to you. Not even you as you might already understand yourself, but you as you don’t know or understand yourself. The whole you that Martin Buber calls a Thou: mysterious, surprising, contradictory, broken, and full of unlocked potentials both frightening and inspiring. Therapy is effective if it helps you explore, expand, grow, cope, endure, or live with more dignity, grace, happiness, love, peace, passion, or fulfillment. Sometimes it’s about putting things together while at other times it’s about taking them apart and exploring them. Sometimes it’s about learning while other times it’s about accepting.
In short, psychotherapy isn’t one thing. That isn’t because it lacks a clear aim and method but because it’s so particular to you. Few things in life are as meaningful and personal as one’s experience in therapy, and in the end its goal is to help us be human through all the highs and lows.
Call today to schedule a session.