How Does that Make you Feel?

How Does that Make you Feel?

The infamous line to any assumption of what being a Mental Health Therapist is like.
This assumption is generally followed by images of humans wrapped up in various cardigans, cross-legged in an oversized chair, with framed glasses perched on the end of their noses.
What if I were to burst your bubble and tell you all these myths (besides the cardigans…man do I have a love affair with those suckers) are not entirely true. Honestly, that one-liner is rarely utilized during my work with clients. There also is not a workday that passes without me cross-legged on the ground processing with a kiddo at one point or another.

What?! Shocker!

While I always smile when I catch myself voicing off this stereotypical question, the truth around the premise of working with a Mental Health Therapist is largely skewed. So many clients arrive to therapy craving to remove an emotion from their experienced repertoire. Or perhaps they have been tantalized by the wishful thinking that clinicians are secretly Hogwarts graduates and can whip out our wands and rid them of their challenges with a glittery *poof*.
No folks, no glitzy magical wands are harbored by us therapists.  

You see,

The point of therapy is to not rid you of the emotional experiences that are seemingly keeping you stuck in the uncomfortable trenches, but to shed light on the choices on what we do with our emotions. The fine print of being a human is that our feelings are an all or nothing situation. We either lean into the full gamut of human emotion, recognizing we must feel the uncomfortable feelings in order to have access to the comfortable, or we shut off one emotion, which quickly leads to a robbing of ANY emotional experience. While our brains seem to show off complexity, our relationship with emotions tend to be dramatic in this sense.

But in all honesty, when we run away from an emotional experience, we tend to lose sight of fully experiencing any emotion to it’s potential. So, if we occupy ourselves with running from emotional pain, then we also lose out on the ability to experience feelings such as joy, pleasure, excitement, and fulfillment. We are simply too distracted by our marathon from the ghost of pain’s past to settle long enough to reap the benefits of emotions we tend to enjoy.

This is where a Mental Health professional steps in.
As a client, one will quickly learn that growing pains do not only occur in their legs.
Therapy is not easy! For the simple fact that a part of the work is to learn how to sit with discomfort of whatever is haunting you. A part of my duty as a clinician is to aid in fostering self-awareness which leads to enlightenment, and this can be a painful process! Not like being stabbed in the stomach by a large knife, but like that burn you feel during an intense gym workout.

Here’s the cold, hard, truth:

Therapy does not work unless you work therapy.

Read that again. Slower this time.

It is NOT a therapist’s job to tell you what to do, or to take an emotional experience away from you. If this happens, please exit stage left ASAP. A therapist’s job is to create a safe, nonjudgmental space for someone to come face-to-face with their “ghosts”. From here, the therapist will foster exploration of different reframes, and processing of the choices the client has in what they do with their emotional experiences. Therapy is an empowering process in which we gain the courage to face our demons, rewrite our patterns, and break generational traumas.

Therapy is an opportunity to rewrite your narrative.

Yet, the key word is opportunity.

Remember, us therapists do not (yet) have magical powers.
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Therapy does not work unless you work therapy.