Therapy

I have therapy every week. I’m currently in my third run of it, with breaks in between. My first run was intermittent, and really just cognitive behavioural therapy, way back in my late teens. Decades later, in early 2021, I decided to pay for actual talking therapy, and did more than a year of it. This time around, I’m six or seven months in. I expect to continue this off-and-on pattern of intensive therapy and then break periods in the future too.

To find a therapist, I just went onto the counselling directory, searched for my area (Edinburgh), and looked through the available therapists. I made a shortlist of a few, sent some enquiries via email, and arranged a free introductory phone call. Then I booked an actual session, and went from there. There’s a review after a few sessions to check that you feel it’s going well, and you can always switch to a different therapist if you don’t gel with your current one. It’s a very individual thing, after all.

I won’t go into the reasons I’m in therapy, but I did want to talk a bit about it in the interests of normalising the act of seeking help for your emotional health. The way it works is that I have a one-hour session (actually a little shorter than that, but it can stretch to an hour if necessary), once a week, and I do the bulk of the talking and the direction-setting. The therapist will sometimes ask questions or make observations, but will refrain from giving direct advice. Suggested possible interpretations, or courses of action, are occasionally given, but the main interaction is the questioning.

I specifically requested to be challenged this time around, and to be prodded a bit more. I find that I respond well to that kind of therapeutic relationship, rather than a more passive, sounding-board sort of setup. Sometimes I prepare for the session explicitly, and sometimes I go with how I feel at the time. For the former scenario, I keep a therapy journal and add notes to it during the week. Not during the session, though; there’s no time or capacity for that.

The sessions themselves are of course intrinsically intimate, and confessional, and self-confrontational at times. They’re also surprisingly physically tiring, and emotionally deadening — there’s a define recovery period afterwards, and then a couple of days of digestion before any revelations become apparent. It’s work, and it’s difficult! To me, it’s most often like an excavation, and a shaking-loose of things, where the first half hour can feel like a rapid descent and the rest can feel like a painstaking climb back up. It’s important to be aware that therapy can be gruelling, and you can feel quite hollowed-out by the end of a session, but always in the service of progress. You also come to look forward to it, and you notice things during the week that you want to bring up in the next session.

The goals of therapy are your own, and another surprise is that they’re often in a state of flux. You find branches and alleys and sidetracks as you go, and have to listen to your instincts about the importance of those apparent digressions. Often they’re very important indeed.

It can be upsetting, of course, and you have to learn to accept those times as a part of the process. You come to realise that they’re actually a bridge towards understanding things or reframing things, rather than representing a dead-end or something you’re not ready for. In time, it becomes quite natural to just move through the emotional component and keep your focus on the trajectory of the session.

Another thing to keep in mind is that therapy often isn’t a repair process; it’s a perspective-changing process instead. Personally, I’ve had a huge amount of benefit from seeing things more clearly, challenging my ingrained interpretations of things, and learning to put experiences into different boxes. Being more emotionally healthy is about how we process trauma and how it affects us in our lives, rather than finding a way to somehow erase the past. It’s very likely that you won’t ever be ‘fixed’ per se. But you can find a path towards understanding yourself better, and then feeling better — for the most part, most of the time! — if you’re willing to do the work.

There’s a non-trivial monetary cost associated with therapy, of course, but I think of it as an investment in myself and in my future, and indeed in my family. Viewed in that way, it’s cheap at the price.

Therapy isn’t a big mystery. You don’t have to lie down if you don’t want to, and it doesn’t involve being interrogated in any adversarial way. You set the pace, and the therapist is a companion who’s on your side. You’d be surprised what can come out of it. If you think you could benefit from talking therapy — and I think that virtually everyone would — then I’d advise you to give it a try.