“Therapy Doesn’t Work”

I talk to a number of people who are hurting or who blatantly have dysfunctional ways of interacting with the world around them. I will lovingly suggest that they seek therapy because I don’t want them suffering from this any longer. A number of them retort with, “Therapy doesn’t work.” I would like to provide a different perspective on that.

Imagine you are trying to get a screw out of a wall, and the only tool you have in your entire house to do the job with is a claw hammer. You don’t have anything else in your house that will work. But you have to get the screw out of the wall. So you’re doing your best with what you’ve got, and it’s just not working very well. Paint and drywall and whatever else walls are made of (I am not a construction worker) are flying everywhere and making a huge mess. You’re probably breathing in the dust from these things, and that’s not healthy!

Then let’s say I come and give you the exact screwdriver you need to get that screw out of the wall. Hooray! Problem solved!

But what if, instead of using the screwdriver, you’re just like, “Yeah, thanks, but I got this,” drop the screwdriver on the floor, and go back to using the hammer? Who would even do that?

It’s the same way with therapy. Our brains are pretty fragile at times, and tend to develop coping strategies to help protect us, and to help us survive and recover from stress and trauma (such as abuse, abandonment, natural disasters, and world-wide pandemics). Unfortunately, we usually pick unhealthy coping mechanisms that end up not helping us heal and, often, leave us passing the hurt on to those around us, whether we mean to or not. Therapists are trained to provide their clients with a non-judgmental listening ear, assess the damage done by past hurts and what the client needs, and then work with their clients to develop healthy coping mechanisms that will actually help them heal.

However, that takes a lot of hard and sometimes very frightening work. And I think too often we’re just like “NOPE” and walk away…or listen to the stigmas against mental illnesses that tell us we need to figure it out on our own, be strong, and only go to therapy if we’re crazy, and so we never go to try to get the help we need.

Another issue is that we tend to go to others expecting them to fix us. No one else on the entire planet can fix us; we are the only ones who can make the choices that will help us get better. Yet we go into therapy expecting the therapist to fix us and all our problems, and while therapists are trained to be very helpful and guide us along the path to healing, they’re still human; they can’t fix us. It’s up to us to make the choices we need to make to truly heal.

Also, we are a very impatient species. We want everything right now, and if something takes longer than we like, even if it’s doing its normal thing, we tend to get angry, feel threatened…and often just give up. But healing takes time. If it’s a broken bone or surgery incisions, we tend to be more patient with the recovery because we understand that it takes some time (although we still want it to hurry up). But we never extend that same patience to our brains, which are often just as damaged, albeit in a different way, as a broken bone. We expect to go to therapy for 6 weeks and have everything fixed! But that’s not the way it usually works, especially if we’re dealing with decades worth of dysfunction and hurt. It takes time, and the more impatient we are and the more we try to hurry the process, the longer healing will take, ironically enough.

Now, there is the occasional therapist who is only in it for the money. If you meet one of these types of therapists, back out of seeing them and warn those you know about them. They don’t actually care about helping people. Yes, this is a job, so they do need to be paid, but you’ll be able to tell if the therapist actually cares or not.

And sometimes you may have to try multiple therapists before you find one that you click with. That’s okay. Therapists are humans, just like the rest of us. We don’t become close friends with everyone because of personality differences (among other things), and sometimes the first therapist someone sees has a different enough personality that it just doesn’t work out. That’s okay! We can let them know, and the therapist can help us find someone who’s a better match for us. But too often people give up on the first try and make generalized statements saying that no therapist could possibly be helpful, which isn’t fair if we’ve only seen one therapist ever.

Therapy only works if we do. If we put in all the hard work, time, courage, and effort, if we are patient with ourselves and don’t expect others to fix us, then therapy will work for us. But we have to do the work ourselves.

Now please use the screwdriver before you make a bigger mess. That hammer isn’t helping anything.

(I understand mental health services are stupidly expensive for no real reason other than the stigmas surrounding mental illness and the bureaucracy of insurance companies. This post is not addressing nor discounting these realities. Nor am I addressing or discounting the damage the church has done in regards to how people view mental illnesses and therapy. That is a rant for another day…)