Therapy

I strongly encourage ANYONE to take part in therapy.  

When I first started with therapy, I didn’t know what I was doing.  I didn’t want to talk to a stranger about how I was feeling. I figured my private matters were my own, and I didn’t need to discuss them.

Again, desperation to get out of the situation I was in led me to buying into therapy. I was having thoughts about giving up on life, and I started talking about it with my therapist.  I figured this was better than scaring my wife, family, and friends. I constantly thought, “Is life even worth this”?

My fear was that I would give up on life before I truly tried to get better by any means necessary.

At first YOU have to start building a relationship with the person YOU are talking to.  Once YOU feel comfortable, start talking, bit by bit, about what is bothering YOU.  Start using YOUR therapy sessions as a sounding board for what YOU are thinking. In a way it is a way for YOU to hear out loud what YOU are thinking.  Strangely the way I was thinking in my head didn’t sound so great out loud.

In the beginning I was very controlling about what I let myself share. I would slice off little bits of topics that I was willing to hear a second opinion on.  It does not mean YOU are going to take the advice YOU are receiving, but for the first time YOU can start to evaluate the therapist’s opinion without being emotionally triggered.

Reading this now I’m realizing that I had a protective bubble I had created giving me space from the physical world and individuals in it.  Then I heard a story that changed my outlook.

It was about the period of medical enlightenment when man kind had thought they knew everything about the human body and how it works.
They had been conducting autopsies on the human body for an extended period of time and really thought they knew what they were talking about. During this period a high number of women died in the days following child birth. Scientist and doctors in an effort to figure out why the death rate was so high for new mothers would perform births in the morning and would do autopsies on the passed women in the afternoon.

One day a doctor noticed that after the afternoon autopsies doctors were not cleaning their tools prior to the new births the following morning.  This doctor brought the findings to his colleagues and was laughed out of the room. His fellow doctors dismissed his finding thinking they were men of science and knew all.  

Later doctors started cleaning their instruments prior to any new patient or autopsy resulting in a decrease in the number of new mothers dying.

Moral of the story – SOMETIMES YOU ARE THE PROBLEM!!

I took onboard the idea that maybe I didn’t know best in my recovery and that I would have to try new ways to get better if I was looking for a new result.

This is when I really started looking under every stone for anything that I might have overlooked.

YOU have to take into consideration that YOU are not perfect and may not know all the right things to do to get better.

For a long time I thought I would wake up one day and things would click back in place. I had to find another way.

YOU have to take on the idea that to get better YOU are going to need to do things that YOU have previously dismissed including therapy.

Therapy works if YOU are actively involved, not if YOU just show up for your appointments.