Maybe You Should Go Back to Therapy

New phone note just dropped:

Everyone should have access to a relationship in which they are allowed to be completely selfish with their language.

Sometimes I have this strange curse of turning conversations into therapy sessions. I don’t do it deliberately, just seems to happen. We start with the usual small talk, don’t get me wrong. But 30 mins later they’re talking about grief, their parents divorce, the ex that hurt them, or some awful thing that happened.

A discussion around therapy inevitably comes up shortly afterwards.

It’s funny to me how we talk about going to therapy like a course of antibiotics. Ah so, something went wrong, you did six months in the trenches, you got better, and now you are cleared for normal life once more.

There’s this idea, I think it’s attributed to Freud, that part of the benefit of therapeutic analysis comes from the fact that you pay for it. Basically, money changing hands creates a business arrangement.

What that means is that you do not have to be charming or likeable in your sessions.

We want folks to like us, obviously. But the one place where you shouldn’t be doing that is the therapist office. I’ve met multiple people who seem to care what their therapist thinks of them. There’s this “I want my therapist to like me” type of vibe. But in elective talking therapy, the business aspect is kind of essential to what makes it useful.

Either way, we are tempted to turn our lives into anecdotes. I knew someone whose social skill (when meeting new people) seemed to be built on anecdotes. They’d worked out which details made them sound sympathetic, heroic, or the villain, which bits to remove, where the joke went, and what lesson they supposedly learned. The whole thing usually made them sound slightly unhinged, likeable, and vulnerable.

Therapy is actually really good for this kind of thing because you don’t need to keep polishing the story. That is much harder to do in a pub, also if you’re drunk, you won’t remember it and you’re far less likely to reflect on it with anything other than shame. It’s not impossible, mind you. Some rare people are extremely good at calling out your bullshit kindly.

Thats one reason why elective therapy is good, because it removes a lot of that messy chat. Because you’re paying somebody to sit in a room with you while you say (ideally) the unedited version of events. Ideally the version that makes you sound jealous, pathetic, cruel, needy, arrogant, afraid, perhaps damaged and even foolish.

The payment should liberate you to say that stuff.

You could tell your therapist, “This thing happened to me, and I made this mistake. I don’t know why I did it, and I don’t know how I feel.”

Maybe this applies more to men, but take courage, GIVEN YOU ARE LITERALLY PAYING THEM, you might now be able to say: “This thing happened to me, and I think it might be connected to this other thing that happened before that. Someone took advantage. Now I’ve got this thing inside of me, I feel like a fool, I think there’s shame attached, talking about all of this makes me hate you and I hate being here. I don’t know how to feel good again. I’m scared shitless.”

Or whatever floats your boat that is closer to the truth, start small if you like.

What I’m saying is don’t go to therapy and skirt around the truth, if you can. It’ll save you a lot of money and you’ll get more out of it.

God, I feel like Martin Lewis money saving expert.

The classic trope is that everyone should be in regular therapy. Maybe that’s far too exhausting, but the old idea that therapy is only for people currently in some kind of emergency is outdated. If anything, therapy is most productive when you’re not in a crisis. When I’m in a crisis, I usually know what the crisis is, and I’m just trying to survive it.

When things are calm, you have valuable headspace. That is when the transactional version of therapy is really useful, mainly because there is no emergency to solve. You get to access a part of you that is beneath all the shit that is going on this week.

It sounds narcissistic, but it’s only tempory. So maybe go and pay for fifty minutes to say whatever the hell you want.

(My radio for the week) Seek courage and remove fear.