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I feel at one point or the other, everyone needs to see a therapist, you really don’t have to let your mental health deteriorate so bad before you tend to it. Has your mental health ever made you visit a therapist before? How was the experience like?
Yes, I have been seeing a therapist for about eight years. My initial struggles were work-related, which resulted in alcohol and drug addiction. I still see her once a week – sometimes I leave her office elated with a sense of purpose; other times I feel worse, but that is part of the process. A client needs to find “the right fit” – if you do not connect with your therapist after three or four sessions, shop around. The right fit can set you on the right path.
I’ve visited three therapists all my life. I’ve learned things from them, so I’d say something positive came from it. However, I do think that I could have gotten a lot more from therapy had my therapists understood more about how to make me feel safe telling the truth. In my experience, therapists don’t talk about their role, nor do they mention the importance of feeling safe and how they try to help clients feel safe so they can talk about everything they need to talk about. I don’t know why my therapists never discussed this crucial issue. Perhaps they didn’t know about it. Perhaps they were trained not to talk about it. Who knows? I am a peer facilitator, and I think the issue of safety is crucial for people to be able to talk about whatever they need to talk about. So in my group, we start each meeting talking about the importance of feeling safe and what we do (and don’t do) in order to try to make this space as safe as possible, while acknowledging that there is no such thing as total safety. I don’t know what therapists do to create safety because no one ever brought up the issue in any session I had. As a result, I would say that although I learned things in therapy, I could have learned so much more if the issue of safety had been worked on explicitly.