Therapy: What is it good for?

This therapist has a lot of questions about therapy. But they basically boil down to one: Does it really help people?

The obvious answer is 'yes.'  We live in a time and place where everyone and their mother is talking about their own mother issues with a trained professional.

BetterHelp has proliferated the podcast airwaves with a tsunami of marketing dollars, and in my opinion, has done the field some great favors in normalizing the struggles that bring people to therapy. My gratitude for BetterHelp stops there, but I can save that for another time.

People credit their therapists with changing their lives.

But I can't help but feel that we (therapists) shouldn't really be here, doing the job we do.

I envision a culture that has already answered the emotional needs of its community. This whole 'pursuit of happiness' thing doesn't really serve all of us. The single minded focus on happiness must be contributing to our national neurosis, right?

For so many of my clients, and for myself, the suffering comes from a deep down belief that they 'should' be happy. If I'm not happy, someone is to blame, and the easiest to blame is myself.

I realized recently that despite my decades of work in this field, guided primarily by belief that acceptance is at the root of a rich life, I have still harbored the belief that I'm supposed to be happy. I didn’t choose this belief; it was fed to me since birth. Furthermore, fact that I'm not always happy is a “me problem.” It's me, and it's a problem.

If it's you, and it's a problem, then there's room for you to pay a professional to fix the “you problem.”

I am the professional tasked with fixing the 'you problem.' But I don’t actually believe you are a problem.

I don't believe your unhappiness a problem.

I don't believe you're doing anything wrong to cause your own unhappiness.

I don't believe you need fixing.

Still I understand that you are suffering, and you need help, and since our culture doesn’t provide that help in an organic way, the therapists are here for you.

So where does that leave us? Can I actually help you to live life in a more meaningful way, with less suffering and more serenity? If I don't even think you have a problem, how am I to help you solve it?

I do it with my magic, of course! The mind bending magic of the paradox: in order to create meaningful change for myself, I must start by accepting myself exactly as I am.

I truly hope that in the near future, I will no longer have a job, because the entire culture will realize that we can't outsource compassion. It needs to be in the zeitgeist, not locked away in the offices of caring professionals. In the meantime, I will hold compassion for you, no matter what. In my office, you will not suffer blame or judgement. Everything is going to be ok.

It will take whole, authentic, compassionate people to get us to the next stage of humanity, where people have finally learned to embrace themselves and others fully. Will you be one of the pioneers? Will you model that capacity for your children? This therapist isn’t here to fix you. I’m here to shower you with compassion until you no longer need me to do that for you, because you’ve found your own personal font of compassion.