Therapy: What's the Point?

What is the point of therapy? I bet if you polled a large group of people, you would have many different answers. I’ll start with my answer (at least at this point in time), then I’ll unpack it:

The point of therapy is to increase awareness of your own thoughts, feelings, actions, and patterns of relating to God, yourself, and others so that you can improve upon and grow in each of those relationships in order to live a meaningful life.

Therapy is especially helpful for this because in it you work with a trained professional—one who is skilled at identifying emotions, spotting patterns, and speaking truth in a caring way—which fosters positive change. We need this because we are masters at deceiving ourselves, which keeps us stuck.

Before we move further, let’s keep in mind three things. No matter your belief system, most religions and sciences agree on the following things:

• We are social creatures and are designed for relationship. Given that truth, it is no surprise that change happens in the context of relationship.

• Everything is connected

• Change is a constant

In therapy it is common to learn about the importance of understanding emotions and “feeling your feelings.” (In fact, I wrote about this in May of 2020. You can find it here.) Paired with this is the importance of validation, which is essentially saying (to yourself and/or others) “that makes sense.” The significance of validation cannot be overstated; emotions serve to communicate and validation signals the message has been received. This alone helps us feel better. Inherent in both of these is a concept of self AND other: my emotions communicate to me AND to you, and validation serves the relationship I have with myself AND you.

Yet, a question that keeps coming up in and out of sessions is: when is this too much? In other words… Can you get stuck in the feeling? If you validate, aren’t you saying it’s ok to stay there? Where do change and problem solving fit into this? Won’t people lose their grit and resiliency?

My answer every time: “It’s both.” With practice—and the help of therapy— we develop wisdom and discernment regarding when it’s time to feel and validate and when it’s time to move on or set a limit with ourselves or others. We need both.

Admittedly, some people get into a therapy bubble and can become so self-reflective in the name of self-awareness that all it really is is self-focus. Self-focus seems to either lead to poor mood and a negative thought spiral or it leads to narcissistic traits, both of which lead to isolation and problematic relationships. Many assume that is what therapy is all about—me, myself, and I— and therefore they’ve written it off as unhelpful to them or their loved one, but these results are opposite to the objective of therapy.

In therapy, when we are asked to look at our own patterns of behavior, thoughts, and emotions… that isn’t the end goal. We’ve missed the mark if self-awareness is where we land. Self-awareness is meaningless if it is not considered in the broader context of our community and world. Self-awareness is an important factor in change, but the most significant influence on change is our relationships.

Let’s shift for a moment to take a look at the process of change.  I find it helpful to think about it this way*:

Unconsciously unconscious - we don’t know what we don’t know, so we keep doing things the same way.

Consciously unconscious - now we know what we don’t know. Here we often repeat old patterns. It’s terribly uncomfortable… if we stay here, it probably turns to self-pity and self-loathing.

Consciously conscious - now we know a new way, but it takes constant effort to do it; we can get a bit of tunnel vision here as we are so focused on the new task at hand.

Unconsciously conscious - now we know and do the new way with little to no effort, which allows our attention to open back up.

* I learned this from the brilliant and wonderful Ken Osean, a local, well-respected therapist who has been practicing in the Dallas area for a long time. 

You can apply this to just about anything, but let’s look at it in relation to driving. As a child, you generally don’t know how to drive a car. While playing, you often see kids move the steering wheel erratically because they don’t understand that would result in driving off the road in less than a second. I remember going to a museum in Chicago as a child and they had a children’s experiential area, much like the Perot Museum in Dallas. There was a car you could sit in and it would test your reaction times for hitting the break and the gas. I pressed the gas with my right foot and the break with my left foot. My parents got a kick out of it and then explained when you drive, you use your right foot for both pedals. I didn’t know what I didn’t know (unconsciously unconscious). As you get older, you begin to understand some of this, but it doesn’t mean you actually know how to drive a car (consciously unconscious). Some of you might remember what it was like to learn to drive, that it required so much of your coordination and attention to turn the wheel just right to make that turn or to press the break or gas with the right pressure. That phase (consciously conscious) lasted for a little while until you got the hang of it. Now, most of us drive to work or the grocery store on autopilot, never having to think about these things (unconsciously conscious).

This give us somewhat of a road map for the process of change, but humans tend to be pretty resistant to change. Anyone who has tried to start or stop a habit can tell you how hard it is. There are two roadblocks we often face:

• We are scared—of the unknown, of our own feelings, of conflict, of failure, of death…you name it. Many people have avoided feeling certain things for so long, that they believe if they open the floodgates, they will drown. The feeling will overwhelm or trap them. (Side note: there is actually a reason for this—when we cut ourselves off from feeling a feeling, we communicate to our brain we can’t handle it. We begin to believe after doing this repeatedly over time that the emotion will only intensify and get worse forever unless we avoid or numb, to the point that we consciously or not begin to believe we’ll die if we let ourselves feel the emotion.) I’m here to tell you that we do not get stuck, the feeling doesn’t last forever. Where we get stuck is in the resistance, not the allowance. We are freed by opening ourselves up to our experience and then moving on… because nothing lasts and change is constant.

• We don’t have the help or support we need. We need skills, people, and faith to support and sustain positive change.

So, therapy doesn’t end with me. It just acknowledges that the only thing I can change is me, not anyone else nor my circumstances. It’s about the broader human experience of self-understanding and growth which isn’t just for me… it’s for you. It’s for our culture and community so we can show up more fully in relationships and not perpetuate problematic behaviors but instead be agents of peace, hope, and love.

Yet, for all of this to occur, we need a compass. All of this has to be rooted in something, and that’s where values come in to the picture, which will be our next blog topic.

So, be thinking for yourself: What guides you? What or who is your guide for change and your relationships? We’ll talk about this next time.