In the past month, I have had two separate friends ask, “Will therapy help me?”. They both knew that I had started therapy last year and wanted to know my experience. I had initially started therapy because of a separation from my spouse. I knew I would need additional help to get through a difficult time. The big question everyone asks is – does therapy help? My answer is – yes! Read on to find out why.
Benefits of Therapy
1. Coping Mechanisms
There are numerous benefits of going to therapy. The one that I found most helpful over the long-term is learning coping mechanisms.
I was having anxiety attacks when I started going to therapy. My hands would start shaking, my heart would race, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the topic that caused the anxiety attack.
Within the very first session, I learned a coping mechanism to start using regularly to calm my “lizard brain” response to the stressors I was having. As I continued my therapy sessions, I learned even more coping mechanisms to help calm the anxiety.
The biggest takeaway on these was – if you continue to use them, it will help decrease anxiety overall, so you will be at a lower level of anxiety on a regular basis. These are lifelong skills that you can keep on hand to use any time you may be going through a difficult period.
2. Openly Sharing Your Feelings
If you are experiencing depression or severe anxiety, you can talk to your therapist about these things openly. I learned from my sessions that a lot of the symptoms I had my entire life were signs of low-level anxiety and they weren’t how the normal public was living their lives. All those restless nights where I couldn’t sleep that started in middle school – a huge sign of an anxiety problem.
I can’t speak personally to the depression side of things, but my husband started therapy for this and it helped him immensely. He was able to work through his symptoms and alleviate some of the pain that depression causes. A big part of his therapy was working through all the problems he experienced in his life that may have led him to get to this point. Depression is specific to each person, so your therapy could look a lot different.
Here is what my husband had to say about his therapy treatment with depression:
A large part of my depression comes from catastrophizing. My brain carried out these scenarios of how a situation “might” go, often multiple scenarios. Learning to mentally step back and realize that I’m making a lot of assumptions and decisions in my mind for people that may not be the reality. Now I can recognize these thoughts more easily and help sort of steer my mind out of them.
Therapy for my depression was based on learning tools to help me deal with my depression.
Working on mindfulness, which is activities that can just kind of take over all your senses.
Mine happens to be woodworking. When I’m woodworking I can just let all the aspects of it take over my senses. The smell of wood, the sound of a hand plane peeling up that perfect curl of wood, even just running my hands over the piece of wood to brush off sawdust. It all became a kind of a vacation for my brain and helps me re-center my thoughts.
I can then go back through those things that were affecting me and see them from other angles. Mindfulness became the best tool for me to deal with my depression. It might not work for everyone but there are plenty of other tools a therapist can help you find and put into use.
Also searching out these feelings of depression and anxiety was another thing that I worked on with my therapist. Finding these events in my life, looking at them from different angles, and realizing those events don’t need to define you or run your life. The therapist became another view of these feelings, teaches you to step back and look at both sides of a situation, and learn from it.
Suicidal thoughts aren’t always “I’m going to kill myself”. Mine where more “I feel like this would all be better if I was just gone’.
Suicidal thoughts can be incredibly scary.
At times I felt like I was at battle with my own mind. I’d have thoughts like “things being better if I was just gone,” while at the same time knowing that wouldn’t fix things.
It’s like there was someone else in there.
I had days where I would mentally say to myself “why are you thinking this way, why do you think things would be better if you were gone, stop!”. Thankfully I could always consciously know that these thoughts were wrong.
Through therapy, as we worked on my depression, the suicidal thoughts also started to lift.
3. Third-Party Sounding Board
Another aspect of therapy that I liked while my husband and I were going through our separation is that the therapist was a great third-party sounding board to run problems past. There were numerous times I would go into the therapist upset, angry, or scared about something that my husband had said.
My therapist was both empathetic to my feelings while at the same time, able to see the other side of the situation and explain different possibilities for why he acted a certain way or said something that made me uncomfortable. She always explained that it was okay to feel the big emotions, in fact, it was good for me to feel the emotion, and then let it go.
Having those third-party thoughts on what happened was exceptionally beneficial. Don’t get me wrong, family and friends would be super supportive of the issue. They would take my side and tell me that his actions or words were unacceptable, which made you feel good to an extent. But sometimes, you just really need another set of eyes to help you see things differently.
4. Personal Growth
A large benefit that is also lifelong from therapy is the massive personal growth that can occur. I started therapy as the result of a specific event in my life but the self-care and coping mechanisms I learned apply to a whole slew of events in my life.
Everything I learned in therapy has benefited many areas of my life. Granted, I’m still a work in progress at many of them, but it has helped my relationship with my husband, family, friends, and co-workers. It applies to all facets of life – personal, home, volunteering, and work.
You can learn a lot about yourself during therapy. You may uncover why you started behaving a certain way and how to better act in the future to achieve better results.
Therapy can help you uncover how you want to be living your life. It may help you find the best in life and teach you how to strive for gratitude and making the best out of any situation.
The best part of therapy – I learned how to be happier, on a regular basis. I learned what I want out of life. If you truly put in the work – you too may discover goals you want to achieve that you used to hide from yourself.
5. Validation of Your Feelings
Yet another benefit – validation of your feelings. Therapists will validate your feelings and let you know that it is okay to feel that way, without judgment. That is something that I realized I wasn’t getting out of some of my closest relationships.
There is nothing worse about talking over a problem with a family member and having them tell you, well you have such a good life, how could you feel that way? It makes you feel guilty for feeling a certain way. I learned that having feelings, even those that I learned growing up were unacceptable, are in fact, okay to feel.
How to Get the Most Out of Therapy
- Find the right therapist for you. I found a few options in businesses that were covered by my insurance and then did research on the therapist options. Typically, there are small biographies about the therapists that you can read.
These biographies include some information on their background and typically a blurb on their idea about therapy. Some of them even get specific enough to state which types of therapy the therapist likes to use.
If you want to, you can schedule a phone call with the therapist and ask questions to learn more about them and determine if they would be a good fit. I didn’t do this myself, but I do see how it would be extremely beneficial.
Similar to the call, you can schedule an initial therapy session with the therapist. In this session, you are free to ask them questions about themselves and their method of therapy. You can also tell if you feel comfortable with the therapist. Sometimes you can just tell that you “click” well with them.
Something additional to consider is that some places will match you with a therapist. There will be an initial session where you will meet with someone who will talk to you about why you are there and what you are hoping to get out of your sessions. They will then match you with a therapist they think will work well with you. This is how my husband was matched with his local therapist and how it works on BetterHelp.
- Therapy doesn’t end in the session. For therapy to be most effective, you have to do the work outside of therapy. I found I did the best when I jotted down notes during or after the session on big topics that we covered with ideas that I could implement. This helped me to remember them better and put them into use in the future.
You also have to practice the techniques you learn outside of the therapy room. This means if your therapist suggests you try meditation, you should try it out in between your sessions.
The same goes for other techniques they may teach you. If you are trying to work on re-framing your negative self-talk, you need to practice those techniques all the time.
For example, if a common thought you have is, “I am not good enough,” you need to practice going over the reasons why you are good enough and go over the positive self-talk statements to counteract that.
Some of my counteractive statements for this one are, “I am good enough because I was able to graduate high school, college, MBA program. I have a family who loves me. A few close friends. My daughter loves me. My cats love me and my dog loves me. These are the reasons I am good enough.”
- To get the most out of therapy you need to be honest and truthful with your therapist, even if those truths are hard to admit. The therapist can only help you as much as you let them. If they don’t know the truth, or what is honestly going on in your head or your life, they will not be able to help you to the full extent.
This one is key. You also have to want to be helped and willing to make changes. If you go in with the mindset that you don’t want to do any work or you don’t want to make any changes, therapy may not work well for you.
- In couples therapy, you both need to want to be there or it won’t work. My husband and I went to one session before our separation. He claimed that he wanted to be there and wanted to try and work it out.
I thought the session went fine because he was finally opening up and I was learning more about what was going on. It turns out, he just felt attacked the whole time and didn’t want to be talking about our relationship.
If one spouse doesn’t want to put in the work, it is not worth it to have them there. It will be far more beneficial to go to therapy on your own and focus on bettering yourself.
What to Expect out of First Therapy Session
- I was so nervous for my first therapy session because I didn’t know what to expect. As it turns out it is mostly lots of background talk about you. You get the opportunity to fill the therapist in on what is going on and why you are there.
I had a couple of different experiences because I had started with the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) through my work and had to transfer when my sessions ran out. In one place, I filled out a short form right before the session. At the other, I filled out a much longer form online that I submitted before the first session.
This helps give the therapist some background. Then in your first session, they read that over and can ask you additional questions to give them even more information.
2. You can ask your therapist questions. This is where you get to ask your therapist questions about themselves if you want to learn more. You can get details on their background and their preferred therapy techniques.
3. At the end of the first therapy session, you may set goals for yourself. Once the therapist knows why you are there, they can help you draw up some goals and action items for your future sessions. These goals will help mark progress along your way and let you know that you are accomplishing something
4. Sometimes, depending on if there is time and how bad you need it, the therapist may be able to offer you some suggestions or guidance as a place to start until your next session. In my first session, my therapist was able to tell me about a simple meditation technique to start working on as a way to help calm my body. I found it helpful that I had at least something to work on while I waited for the next session where we got to the real work.
Getting Started with Therapy
If you are sitting around contemplating trying out therapy, I suggest you give it a try. Typically, workplaces offer an EAP program to their employees where at least a few sessions will be covered at no charge to you. I found that it was a great place to start.
Otherwise, research counseling or therapy businesses in your area to see what is available. Several of the places in my location were rated and reviewed, which helped to determine which ones I should look into further. Another place to get started would be to talk to your primary care provider. They will be able to refer you to some therapists that they have heard good things about.
If you’d rather check out online options, I’ve heard good things about BetterHelp from a few podcasts that I listen to, so that would be a good place to start. From what I’ve heard, BetterHelp can typically get you in within a few days.
I’ve found that in-person therapy can be a bit more difficult to get into (depending on your situation), so expect to wait a week or two before you can get in for your first session.
If you’re looking for help or just to improve yourself and work on self-development, I highly recommend therapy, either finding a local provider or through BetterHelp.
I wish I would have started therapy sooner. I could have learned more about myself earlier in my life and been able to implement the techniques I learned much earlier in my life. I wish you the best of luck on your therapy journey and hope you can find the help that you need.
