Edit: so please also help me understand this- if a person doesn’t have family and friends to support, sounds like therapy won’t really help this person unless they change their living conditions, or they relapse?
In: 68
A therapist can do a few different things for you:
-Let you express thoughts and feelings that you may not be able to express elsewhere
-Provide you with tools to understand and properly frame those thoughts and feelings
-Provide you another perspective on the issues affecting your life
I can only speak from personal experience, but therapy has given me a new perspective on myself and a lot of blindspots in my life. I never realized just how many painful things I internalized; I was narcissistic, pessimistic, had a victim complex, and the list went on. And although I still struggle with those qualities from time to time, being aware of them, and getting advice and even more importantly, support from the therapists I’ve met has enabled me to be the person I want to be rather than the person I was due to my circumstances and trauma.
One therapist put it best for me; right after my engagement fell apart (which is what initially made me seek therapy) told me I needed to grant myself “power” in my life. The power to take back what I needed rather than allowing myself to be at the mercy of my circumstances (which, in retrospect, I realize was important in changing my negativity and victim complex) and the power to grant myself the love and care I needed for myself, rather than trying to fill that void from the love of others.
Therapy is highly personal, and has different values for different individuals, but I find the most blanket explanation is it gives you an understanding of how you process, react to, and enable things in your life that you may not have been aware of and want to either empower or change based on your values.
Edit: I realize this isn’t really an ELI5 answer; I just saw the question and want to give my thoughts and I didn’t really pay attention to the sub. There are other excellent answers that deserve the proper recognition of the sub.
Therapy comes in a lot of shapes and sizes, but I can speak to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – I’ve been in treatment for a couple months, and it’s been wildly effective.
I’m… “Me”, I guess. I have my ways, I have my instincts, I have the ways I think about things. “Me” is kinda like driving a new car off the lot – these are the specs, this is how it handles, its gas mileage is whatever.
If the car has crappy horsepower, we can beef that up; or if it handles wierd, we can change the shocks; or maybe we upgrade the stereo/speakers for better music.
CBT is along those same lines: there are things that “off the lot Me” isn’t particularly good at. Therapy gives me a series of exercises and daily practice that, as I work through them, makes me intelligently/consciously aware of what my natural wiring does, and – being acutely aware of that – I can intelligently handle it a different way that has a better outcome in the long run. With practice, the natural/crappy wiring… Changes to the upgraded way.
More concrete: 3 months ago (and for 30-ish years before that), I’d face an unfortunate thing but I had some tricks I learned as a child that made the unfortunate thing “disappear”. It didn’t really disappear, but it got kicked out of my head so I didn’t worry about it. That makes a slow burn that eventually explodes in very bad ways. After a short time of CBT, I unlearned my child tricks and I face the unfortunate thing in the moment – I acknowledge it, address it, and move on with it resolved.
No slow burn, no disastrous consequences in the long term. Happy, healthy, well-adjusted person. Sweet!
Even more concrete: I was given an exercise called ARC. At the end of the day, I’d look back on difficult situations and breakdown the Antecedent (what happened), my Response (how I handled it), and the Consequence (good or bad, what happened after). After a few days of it, I’d start noting the A in the moment to make my exercise easier later. After a few days of that, I became aware of both A&R, both in the moment. After a few days of that, I could foresee the C. Pretty quickly, it clicked that “C is bad. I need a different R”.
In no time, I went from “making it disappear” to addressing the thing in the moment.
The tricks I’d learned as a child were important then. I was a kid in some fked up situations and I needed them to get by. As an adult, I can handle fked up situations. Keeping the kid tricks is self-destructive now, but they were soooooooo ingrained in “me” that I had to consciously unlearn them.
https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/cognitive-behavioral
Therapy can train your brain to access growth mindset and to heal from stress or trauma. Therapy offers a nonjudgmental and trained professional to keep your mind well-just like doctors do for bodies.
Think about mental health/wellness in the same way you think about physical health. Being “healthy” requires good habits, for example: balanced diet => surrounding yourself with non-toxic people, staying active => being nice to yourself.
Bad habits can be really tough to break, so the same as a nutritionist or a trainer can help you build good physical habits, a therapist helps build good mental ones.
If I bought a plot of land and all the dry wall, 2x4s, nails and hammers on earth it doesn’t mean jack for building a house.
I need a construction manager to at the LEAST tell me how to use the tools, and even then when I build my first awful house, they can advise me me on how to improve. Eventually I’ll be happy with the house and the construction manager can feel safe that the house isn’t going to cave in and kill me; then I won’t need a construction manager.
The field of psychology has figured out a fair bit about how our minds work and developed techniques to help them heal and grow. Therapists are typically trained in these tools and can help you take advantage of them.
Also, sometimes it just helps to talk about stuff and get a different perspective. 🙂
Source: I am a therapist.
There are many different reasons why someone might want or need therapy—likewise there are many different kinds of therapists. For the sake of ELI5, I’m going to assume this is a very general question about very general therapy.
A person(client) will come in and say, “I’m having trouble with XYZ” and the therapist will attempt to work with them on that problem. That’s the absolute short version. Therapists are there to help someone solve a problem.
Sometimes these problems are … complex. Often, these problems came about because of something else—a personality trait maybe, a refusal to acknowledge something, repressed feelings or memories, etc. A therapist may try to help the person untangle all of this information in such a way that the two of them together can get to the root of the problem.
A good example of this (so I’m not speaking in riddles) is relationship/couples/marriage counseling. There is a problem (not many people go to see a therapist for funsies), the therapist tries to help clarify where that problem is coming from, and ultimately how to resolve it.
In general, a therapist’s job is to make themselves unnecessary. We are trying to build capacity in the person(client) so that they can work through these or other types of problems without our help in the future. We will be happy to help, but will be even happier to see them stand on their own.
Like I said at the beginning though, there are many different reasons why therapy might take place and many different approaches to therapy. The most basic version is really just to help develop problem-solving skills (with the added bonus of self-trust, self-confidence, and self-acceptance along the way!).
Therapy gives you tools you didn’t have before for coping and understanding so that you can work through your own emotions to situations that you could not before.
Depending on why you are in therapy, there may be medication involved as well if your condition has caused some imbalance in your brain where the meds rebalance the brain and then therapy locks in the rebalance so you can come off of the medication later now that you can cope.
A good therapist is a neutral third party who can let you say all the stuff you can’t stay otherwise. They will give you feedback on your situation and help with coping strategies for certain situations you might find yourself in. And they will help you identify information about yourself and others in your life.
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