What Does Therapy Involve?

What Therapists Do If You Ask My Dad

Here are things I will try my best to better not worse:

• • Anxiety, aka “Stop being anxious about the next time you will get anxious.”

  • Depression, aka “When you feel like crap and are resisting the urge to smack people for suggesting all the activities that your depression stops you from doing.”

  • Couples Therapy, aka “Why your partner saying, ‘This relationship is going nowhere,’ is not a good thing.”

  • Teens and Adolescents, aka “Tattooing your eyeballs is a choice, let’s explore reasons why that’s not a good idea and ways to teach your parents that what you’re feeling is a normal part of getting older, and that making you a robot that smiles, says yes to everything and scores 110% in your exams is not plausible—plus a time machine showing them the exact day they yelled ‘I hate you!’ and snuck out of the house.”

  • Parenting & Family Systemic Therapy, aka “It’s OK to hate your kids sometimes,” and the “I should have kept the receipt when they were born” regret.

  • Family Conflict, aka “My family is a life sentence for a crime I never committed.”

  • LGBTQI+, aka “Sorry if I forgot a letter, I just didn’t want to be cancelled by accident if I pressed the wrong keyboard button.”

  • ADHD, aka “I can’t concentrate on one thing and—hey, look at the cat.”

  • Trauma—but not the “how wearing the wrong pair of socks when you were seven became a traumatic experience” type.

  • Cross-Cultural Counselling, aka “Coping with how people portion their food and why they get offended if you drop in without scheduling it 2 years and 34 mins in advance.”

  • The “I Don’t Know Why I Am Here”, aka “My family told me I needed therapy.”

  • Life Coaching, Training, and Development.

  • The Classified Files, aka “Talking about a problem that will cause another problem if I tell anyone in my life.

Disclaimer: There’ll be no Himalayan salt candles, no “drink a glass of water and count to ten” rubbish, and definitely no 30 minutes of uncomfortable eye contact while I scribble madly because you made a warped trauma joke. And if you ever catch me saying something like, “The fragmented self exists within the liminal architecture of your grief,” I’ll give you a refund.