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20 Of The Most Brilliant Things People Realized In Therapy That They Felt Everyone Should Know About
Article created by: Austėja Akavickaitė
Going to therapy can be a wonderful step in taking care of your mental health and learning healthy coping mechanisms. Sometimes, all we need is an unbiased, outside perspective to help us work through trauma, sort out our fears and uncertainties and remind us that we are enough just the way we are. I often leave a therapy session feeling 10 pounds lighter than I did an hour prior, as I’ve been reminded that I don’t have to let stress be a massive burden on my shoulders.But the thing about therapy is that we don’t all have the time, money or resources available to go. It can be incredibly expensive if not covered by insurance, difficult to squeeze into your schedule, and finding a therapist who you mesh with can be a long and arduous process. That’s why it’s so great when people pass along the wisdom and life lessons they’ve gleaned from their therapists!
Down below, we’ve got a list of some of the best knowledge Reddit users have heard from therapy, as well as an interview we were lucky enough to receive from Randy Withers, LCMHC. This article may not be as effective as a weekly one-on-one session while laying on a chaise longue, but there are still plenty of insightful words that can give you a fresh perspective. Be sure to upvote the advice you would have paid money for, and let us know in the comments if you’ve ever learned any golden nuggets of wisdom from therapy. Then if you’d like to have even more free therapy, check out this Bored Panda article next!
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#1
The fact that you are high functioning doesn't mean that your illness is easier for you to deal with, it means it's easier for others to deal with.
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#2
When my sweetheart of 43 years was diagnosed with stage IV cancer I gave up everything to care for her. Overwhelmed with grief and exhaustion, I found myself having suicidal thoughts. I sought counseling.
One evening I had a thought that felt like a solenoid firing in my brain:
"Just because the love of my life could be dying, that doesn't mean I have to stop living."
I started building in mini-vacations every day. Play music. Ride a motorcycle. Fly a drone. Tell a joke.
We both survived.
#4
Sometimes, when we procrastinate, it's because we need to feel control, even when the only thing we can control is choosing not to do something - even when it contributes to making our situation worse. Took me years to come to terms with that one.
#5
that my past trauma and upbringing aren't excuses for my bad behavior, and i have to be the one to break the cycle
#8
Your internal monologue isn’t always reliable, especially when you are anxious or depressed.
#9
Give yourself permission to grieve.
Not just for the loss of loved ones, but for anything that makes you feel sad.
#10
The five-minute rule. Try something you usually enjoy but don't currently have the motivation to do for five minutes. Set a timer; if you're not enjoying it after five minutes, it's okay to stop. A five-minute challenge seems way more doable when you're unwell than longer ones.
#11
When you place unexpressed expectations on someone, YOU are the one setting yourself up to be let down.
#13
Friends will come and go. Family, in different ways, can and will do the same.
You're the only constant youre going to have in your life.
Be a friend to yourself. You wouldnt say any of the negative things to your friends that you say to yourself.
Learn to pick yourself up when you're down, but also allow yourself to be human.
It's difficult, but it's one of the most important things I've learned in my life as someone who suffers from Major Depression Disorder, and who beat himself up way more than I should have.
#14
My psychologist told me that learning new skills and knowledge, or establishing a new habit, creates a new neural pathway in your brain. It's like hacking your way through a jungle; it takes a lot of time, effort, and energy to reach your destination (or achieve your goal). However, every time you do the thing, you reinforce that same neural pathway in your brain. As it is reinforced it becomes easier to fire up those neurons again, and thus, it becomes easier to do the thing. The jungle is still dense, but it is a little easier to follow the same path that you created yesterday, and every time you take that path it becomes a little more clear. Eventually the behaviour may become so automatic that it requires no effort at all to follow that path.
With respect to breaking a habit, or overcoming addiction: it takes serious effort to stray from your path, once it is established. Taking a new path means hacking through thick jungle again, but this time it requires even more effort because you know you could just follow the old, established path.
This analogy has helped me quit smoking, study for exams, and establish a walking routine when I was too depressed to move. If all you get out of doing the hard thing is the benefit of having done the hard thing one time, it hardly seems worth the effort. It's tempting to put it off until later. But if every successful attempt to do the hard thing makes that path easier to follow, it really is worth starting now. The reward is not just the infinitesimally small health benefits of 10 more minutes without smoking; the reward is actually proportional to the effort put in, because that is how much progress you have made towards your goal. Taking the easy path started to seem like a really dumb idea. Stubbornness kicked in and I started achieving goals.
#16
I was feeling a lot of pressure and guilt from my mom because she wanted me to do something for her that I really didn't want to do. One of my therapists (who heard a lot about my relationship with my mom) made a simple statement that really helped:
"If your mom wants you to do things for her, maybe she should be nicer to you."
It sounds so obvious, but because of mom's continuously using guilt to raise me and my siblings to feel shame, I had a hard time saying no.
This little idea really turned things around for me, not just between me and my mom, but also for other people in my life who like to treat me badly and keep expecting me to come back for more.
#18
I was going on about something an ex had done that hurt me. I backpedaled a bit and said something like "I want to give them the benefit of the doubt." My therapist said, "Hey. I'm going to stop you there. I've noticed that you give EVERYONE the benefit of the doubt. Except for yourself. You have to be kind to yourself, you know?" Blew my freaking mind. Started bawling my eyes out, really freed me in a way.
#19
We seek what is familiar to us, even if it’s really unhealthy. There is a comfort in familiarity because it’s what we know / learned how to deal with.
#20
That you can’t control how people act towards you, but you can control how you react to them. It’s something I use with my 9 and 6 year old to help them and it’s so effective.
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