Should You Go To Therapy?
One of my most engaged stories on Instagram is when I chatted about starting therapy a few months ago.
Little disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional and I don’t intend for this to be viewed as professional medical advice. Okay now that that’s out of the way, let’s chat about why I started going to therapy.
Backstory: I don’t have a ton of experience around therapy. I went once as a kid when my parents got divorced (they ended up remarrying each other) but I don’t remember much. My husband and I did go to premarital counseling but we knew the guy who was doing it beforehand.
That’s about it really.
We didn’t really talk about feelings much growing up.
Now that I’ve been going to therapy for a few months, I’ve learned that a lot of my workaholic and controlling tendencies stem from feeling like I’m not enough. Like I always need to prove myself. Before going, I hardly ever allowed myself space to process my feelings - instead I’d try to outwork them. Push them down or the the side but never really come face to face with them. I was highly addicted to achievement.
Breaking point: when I decided to stop working weekends and I literally had a meltdown one Sunday when I couldn’t work. I didn’t know who I was or what my purpose was other than working. I sat in my kitchen and cried because my husband wasn’t there and I just felt so purposeless.
I knew then that I needed some help.
Not gonna lie, I was nervous to tell my husband what happened that day/that I thought that maybe I needed to go to therapy. Not because he would judge me BUT because I knew my ego would be a bit bruised admitting that I couldn’t do something on my own.
Therapy, to me, is a tool. It’s somewhere that I went to learn strategies to help me healthily navigate my feelings and emotions.
If you take anything away from this please take this: comparing the “size” of your problems to the “size” of someone else’s problem is pointless. Your struggles are valid. Your feelings are valid. I used to think that going to therapy was selfish because there are people in the world who have way bigger problems than me and I was taking up time from a therapist that could be used by them.
Don’t be ashamed to get help.
We don’t ever question asking for help if we break a bone. We go to the doctor.
Or can’t reach something on a high shelf. We ask someone taller than us.
Or if we need help losing weight. We seek advice from a personal trainer.
So we shouldn’t feel shame or embarrassment when we need to ask for help to sort through our feelings and emotions.
So do YOU need to go to therapy?
Honestly, I think every single person can benefit from going to therapy. It’s a place where you become aware of unhealthy patterns that you’ve adopted. A place where you learn strategies to best cope with navigating life healthily and tools to help you communicate effectively for others. You learn how to advocate for yourself. You learn how to get to the root of why you’re feeling certain things instead of avoiding them and hoping they’ll magically go away.
Let’s be a people who release the stigma of getting support for our mental health. Because it’s just as important as our physical health!
If you want to hear more about my experience of choosing a therapist and how my first appointment went down, tune into episode 008 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast: