- People typically treat their therapy like they treat themselves.
- There are clues about how we relate to (and take care of) ourselves in how we treat our therapy. While your therapist is probably already paying attention to these dynamics, you’ll accelerate your timeline for change if you too start to observe the parallels between how you treat your therapy and how you manage your inner world.
- Some examples: (1) Are you always running behind and scattered as you show up to therapy? I would guess you may be feeling overwhelmed and scattered internally too.
- (2) What about the person who can’t make time for therapy and often cancels? I’d be wondering if they can’t make time for themselves. Is it hard for them to be present or alone with their thoughts and feelings? Do they feel like everyone and everything else is more important than their well-being?
- While someone who can’t make time for therapy might, in fact, be busy – your therapist is (likely) looking out for a deeper explanation. I encourage you to do the same.
- We all are (after all) somewhat responsible for how busy we are, and the busyness we create may be a strategy to stay away from what happens inside of us when there is more stillness and quiet.
- (3) Does someone completely plan out what they want to talk about in advance of an appointment? What does this tell us about their need for control? What about someone who rarely thinks in advance about topics for session, what does this tell us about their relationship with intentionality or their sense of agency over their time?
- (4) Even traits that we think of as “positive” (like being responsible and never canceling appointments) can tell us something about how a person relates to themselves. Perhaps they’re a person who struggles with prioritizing something other than the “plans”. Maybe the “rules” are “in charge”, rather than their priorities, values, or well-being.
- I want to be clear *none of this is meant to be critical* in any way, about how people treat their time in therapy – or to suggest there is one right way to participate. How ever we do participate reveals information about how our priorities are addressed, decisions are made, and how a person relates to themselves.
- Exploring how we treat our therapy as an extension of how we treat ourselves can be a helpful starting point to change ways of relating to ourselves that may not be working, but are second nature.
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All of the examples in today’s post are common (but not exhaustive) examples of how we can treat our therapy in a way that reveals something incredibly relevant and potentially life changing about how we relate to ourselves. Many skilled therapists will be able to bring up these types of observations in time, but don’t underestimate the power of being the person who spends the most time in your own head; you can, and should, bring these types of observations to your therapy to help you better understand (and potentially change) yourself.
One of the reasons I started this account was to help people who are “stuck” in their therapy by giving tools to “boost” their treatment. Your therapist is paying attention to how you relate to your therapy, and you can do the same. Looking at the process of how you relate to your therapy can help you examine (and if desired) challenge a pattern that you didn’t know could be different. This can be a great topic for a therapy that’s fallen into a rhythm, or for a therapy (or person) that is stuck.
Some of the most impactful moments in therapy happen when a client can look at and explore a dynamic within them that they are simultaneously aware of, but don’t necessarily think of as relevant or useful. These are often moments when a client would say “I’ve always been that way”, or “this is just how I am”. And yes, this is how you’ve always been, and we are here in this space to look at that, and help you determine how (positively, and negatively) that effects you, your relationships, your responsibilities, and your pleasure in life.
Comments:
- I mention in the post that we are all somewhat responsible for the busyness we create. The more resources we have the more control we have over this, so I especially want you to be curious if you’re a person with extras (like if you make more than just enough money to get by, if you have help with your childcare or responsibilities etc) and you still struggle with finding time for therapy (or yourself).
- We often repeat relational patterns with our therapists (i.e. we feel like we can’t be angry with people, so we don’t allow ourselves to be angry with our therapist, or we feel it’s our job to be accommodating so we don’t tell our therapist when something isn’t working for us). How we treat our therapist is a whole additional set of cues into how we relate to others, and that can (and probably will be) another post all on its own.
- Today’s post covers insights therapists can gain around process (as opposed to content).
- We can get highly philosophical here about what it means to ‘make time for ones-self’. Sometimes we are trying to treat ourselves well, or take care of our selves, yet we still feel overwhelmed, burned out, alone, sad, frustrated – or any other host of negative feelings that indicate that despite our efforts, we’re still not doing well. Knowing what we do for ourselves, versus what we do because we feel we have to do it can be confusing. For more on this see my post on Shoulds vs Wants.
- Want to learn more about how therapists think? Read my post called Think Like a Therapist.
- Another time we might be inclined to say “I’ve always been that way”, or “this is just how I am”, is when we’ve hit a point of hopelessness. For more on how to explore if we need to ask ourselves and others to accept us as we are, or if we want to be working towards change, please see my post on “Acceptance vs. Hopelessness” .