What If Everyone Went For Therapy?
Self-awareness to collective awareness!
I have heard this statement a thousand times in my life:
“People in therapy often go to therapy to deal with people in their lives who refuse to be in therapy.”
I don’t know who said it, but they aren’t entirely right. First of all, you don’t go to therapy primarily because you want to better your relationship with others: you go to therapy for your own sake. The amelioration of your relationships is a ripple effect of individual psychotherapy. You might enter therapy with “I don’t know what’s wrong with me: I can’t seem to maintain a romantic relationship in my life. So far, I have dealt with a series of failed relationships. I can’t seem to find the right person. Please help, doc.”
You might start with it being about others, but gradually, you move inwards and start exploring your patterns. If your therapist is well-tuned into their practice, they would never say: “Person A in your life is a bad person and it makes sense that you feel this way about them!” (until and unless the issue is related to abuse; yet, throwing around crude negative judgements is not what therapists practice). In fact, they would make you explore how Person A makes you feel, and if that aligns with how you want to feel in any relational dynamic. The primary goal of therapy is self-awareness, it’s education about oneself. It is education about your identity, your life experiences that are determining your thought patterns, your behavioural patterns, your triggers, your relational patterns, your well-being, and the like (there is so much to learn about oneself). And as a result of this, you operate better in your mileu.
Visualise a world in which everyone took therapy and people understood themselves better. This is what I am visualising as I am writing this:
More Self-Awareness
You start to gain insight! Insight into your own mind. The neural connections in your brain that haven’t fired in ages start firing. You start thinking, and thinking right.
For people who are high on ruminative tendencies, you might be thinking too much already. It makes sense that you really don’t want to think more. But therapy will help you because you’d start thinking in the right direction. A therapist’s ability to raise the right questions in front of you would work as a blessing! Remember: Rumination is an unhealthy thinking pattern, and emerging out of this and engaging in the right thought processes is the important course of action that an individual needs.
So, let’s replace “thinking” with “insightful thinking.” This is a metacognitive way of thinking where you zoom out and start viewing your life from a bird’s eye view. You gauge your way of being, in entirety. You connect the dots, you lead a more informed life (which keeps incrementing as you continue being in therapy), you slowly start understanding your triggers (and start regulating your response towards them), you start questioning your conditioning (and work towards changing patterns), you realise how you learned behavioural patterns (observation, reinforcement, punishment, internalisation, etcetera), and you come closer to yourself.
Now, therapy is a very very (I mean, very slow) process. It is possible that it might not be instantly reinforcing, but you have to keep at it. There would be a day when you’d get here. There would be a day you’d start reparenting yourself. There would be a day you’d realise that showing up for sessions was after all, worth it.
More Emotional Awareness
As you start becoming more self-aware, you start addressing your emotions better. This one is a tougher cookie to crack. But, not impossible. You start to truly know how you’re feeling in a given moment, you acknowledge your emotions, and you start being kinder to them. Other than getting irritated at yourself for always being “cranky”, you start understanding why is it that you’re feeling cranky. You start analysing your external environment, and knowing what makes you feel what. With this, you also learn to pick the battle you want to fight: since not every negative emotion needs to be worked through, you start choosing the elements that need work.
An upshot of this is that you gain the ability to delineate your feelings better: you start looking within and understanding yourself.
More Trauma-Informed Individuals
Therapy is a slow-burn, but it is highly rewarding once you start tapping into the traumas that you might have experienced in your life. By trauma, I am referring to any moment that acts as a ‘course shifter’: you are walking a particular path, but inadvertently something takes place in your external environment and shifts the course that you were walking. Here, any form of emotional/ sexual/ physical abuse would play a role. Anything that breaks your personal boundaries can be a trauma, depending on whether or not you had someone to placate you the moment it happened.
Therapy helps you in becoming aware of your life events, moments that you haven’t processed. The point isn’t to forget these moments, but to actually become informed about them. Being trauma informed empowers us. Again, we get closer to the self.
More Self-Love
As you start accomplishing the aforementioned, you start choosing yourself. Your sense of self starts forming, your self-worth starts increasing, your life starts unfolding in a more aligned manner, you become compassionate towards your shortcomings (which will always be something we work on, we are humans), you establish a toolkit to function better, you start becoming mindful about who you spend your time with, you become more passionate towards your life, you become you.
You start falling in love with yourself.
And, ripple effect:
Less Projection
Kinder to self leads one to be kinder to others. People who are high on criticism, pessimism, negative judgements, and skepticism are often the same towards themselves. And their inability to see that within makes them project it to others. Projection has the tendency to cause a significant amount of trouble in relationships.
Knowing ourselves better helps us in understanding what about us we tend to project on other people. You start using your relationships to become a better version of yourself, just so you can show up better in those relationships. We feel more responsible towards ourselves, and not everything is the other person’s fault.
More Vulnerability
You are able to see that you aren’t a perfect individual. Your ability to accept your imperfections makes others become more accepting of their own imperfections. And as everyone starts accepting their shortcomings, we start showing up differently in relationships. We become compassionate towards each other, we listen better, we give more, and become better at being our authentic selves.
More Healthy Boundaries
Once we start to understand what works for us and what doesn’t, we are able to assert out boundaries. However, we do this politely because we don’t want to come across as a threat to the other person. The goal is to express ourselves more humbly and not in a defensive manner — if you approach conversations from a self-preservation standpoint, you will make the other person defensive. You are able to give the other person the time that they need to process the new adjustments that your relationship needs.
Knowing our deal breakers, non-negotiables, negotiables, and permeable boundaries is integral in order to operate healthily in any relational context.
Less Personalisation
This one’s my favourite!
When you start seeing that the other person is acting from their own behavioural patterns, you start noticing how their actions have less to do with you and more to do with them. And, a sense of healthy detachment develops, and individuality is respected!
Less Codependency
As a result, we no longer remain people who look for self-worth in our relationships! We approach relationships as a whole and not from an incomplete standpoint.
That said, please remember that therapy is a very slow process. It takes time to reach here. You have to remain committed to yourself. If it were up to me, I would ask people to remain in therapy forever. It’s such an educative process, and it never truly ends. This is not to say that one should be “dependent” on therapy to remain functional. But, one can choose therapy to continue striving to be a better version of oneself.
Just saying, therapy can be viewed as we view fitness: we take breaks from it, but we never really stop because we address that it is a need.
