Swimming With a Straightjacket
A short essay about why finding the right therapist matters.
When I think back to the first time I decided to see a therapist, I can hardly believe how different of a person I was. The year was 2015, and I had driven across the country from Pennsylvania to California only six months earlier. I didn’t have the clarity to see it at the time, but my grand plan to quit my stable, well-paying engineering job to sell solar panels door-to-door in Huntington Beach was failing miserably.
Despite the fact that I was working 60 to 70 hours per week, I could barely afford to pay rent and buy groceries. I was physically and mentally exhausted from the sheer effort required to sustain myself, and those who have ever experienced financial difficulties know the extent to which anxiety around making ends meet was permeating every aspect of my existence. Beneath these challenges, however, stirred an altogether different beast: I was slowly beginning to realize that I was far out of my depths. I found myself questioning whether or not my decision to move to California may have been a mistake of epic proportions. Indeed, a journal entry from that time in my life reads, “I feel like I dove head first into the ocean without realizing that I had a straightjacket on.”
When I made this decision to seek professional help, I had never seen a therapist before, nor did I know of anyone in my family or friend groups who had either. I met with the first therapist with whom I could schedule an appointment and, having no conception of what difference it made (in addition to finding her attractive), I agreed to continue meeting with her. I only ended up seeing her for eight sessions and, having an altogether dissatisfactory experience, subsequently wrote off “therapy” as a viable option for getting the help I needed. For those who are curious about what happened in these sessions that made the experience so dissatisfactory (and how to use my mistakes to your advantage), consider becoming a subscriber because I will explore this more deeply in future posts.
In my previous post, “Masters of Fate, Captains of Soul”, the intention was to contextualize the process of psychotherapy and introduce a solid ground upon which feelings of hope and motivation to change can be justified. The fundamental point I was attempting to convey is that psychological healing and growth is an objective capacity of the psyche in the same way that physical healing and growth is an objective capacity of the body. I wish I could say to my younger self, “James, you are injured. There is nothing inherently wrong with you, its just that you have been injured and you need help.”
This contextualization centered on the notion that psychological healing and growth happens in the points of contact between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche. What is consciousness? The capacity to see, hear, feel, and bear witness to the signals coming from within our unconscious: our feelings, intuitions, thoughts, and perceptions, among others. This is why the majority of the work in psychotherapy revolves around learning to feel our various feelings and understand their role in our lives by talking about them. It is an intentional, deliberate engagement with - or activation of - the transformative, healing capacity of the psyche which is part and parcel of our human experience.
If healing and growth are natural capacities of the individual psyche, what is the benefit of inviting in another person, be it a friend, coach, mentor, or psychotherapist into the process? Fundamentally, when we allow another person to engage with our process, we are leveraging their consciousness to apply to our own efforts to bear witness to ourselves. This is why it feels good to connect with people who are willing to understand us without trying to change us. This is why having our experience seen, heard, and validated feels good. Not only are we bearing witness to our own feelings, but our process of doing so is being held in the consciousness of the other. The reason I share these aspects of my story is because when I first made the decision to seek professional help, I didn’t know what therapy was, or what it was supposed to do. My only impression of therapy was that it was the thing that people did when they didn’t feel good emotionally. As a result, I had no awareness around how to approach (a) my decision-making around choosing a therapist and (b) what to do when I decided that I needed to go in a different direction.
Hopefully by now, you have a visceral understanding that there exists a distinct, objective mechanism in your psyche that autonomically facilitates the healing and expansion of your subjective human experience. With luck, this simple understanding has provided a glimmer of hope and optimism in readers for whom life is dark, confusing, or frustrating, or otherwise at an utter standstill. With this understanding, I hope it becomes evident how inviting the right person along to participate in this process with you becomes of paramount importance.
It is my hope that in reading these posts a clear message is beginning to form around the innate potential for healing that exists in you and the importance of finding the right person to enlist as help in the process (if not, consider becoming a paid subscriber to tell me how you really feel!) I am also aware that the previous two posts have ended in a promise to explore the specifics of finding the right therapist, a promise which has again failed to materialize. In order to avoid a third unfulfilled promise, I will conclude with the reassurance that the story will continue next week and that eventually, the specific aspects of finding the right therapist will come to light.