If you ask my dad, he would tell you that therapy involves walking into a room with someone who says “uh-huh… interesting… wow” for an hour and then gives you an invoice.
For those of you who have never been to therapy before, let me start here: it’s not all about lying on a couch discussing how wearing the wrong pair of socks when you were seven turned into a traumatic experience.
People come to therapy for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it’s one specific issue, sometimes practical support or life advice, sometimes to yell for an hour, and sometimes it’s simply having a place where you can talk about a problem that would cause another problem if you talked about it with someone else.
So, there will 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.
Life happens while you’re planning for it, so people can come in with a specific issue. Relationship breakdowns, job loss, grief, family conflict, illness — suddenly the thing we planned to work on isn’t the thing sitting in the room anymore.
So, we unpeel the onion that is your life, figure out what’s going on, or just get to work.
And if you ever catch me saying something like “the fragmented self exists within the liminal architecture of your grief,” I will give you a refund.