How does therapy actually work, how do you find a good one, and what’s the difference between counseling/therapy/psychiatrists/psychologists/etc.?
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I’m pretty sure I was a narcissist in my early 20s when I started psychotherapy. The way I would describe my treatment is imagine having a closet where you’ve been putting all sorts of shit all your life. Some stuff is dirty, some is broken, some is rotten. But some is clean, some is valuable, some has sentimental value, etc. Now, this closet is big and deep and you can’t see everything in there from the outside. You remember some things but mostly you’ve forgotten about the things you can’t see.
Psychoanalysis for me was opening that closet and taking things out one at a time, and seeing what’s in there. Some ugly stuff you can’t throw away because it’s valuable, but now you know it’s there. Maybe something rotting could be cleaned so it doesn’t ruin what’s next to it. Maybe what you remember as something big, is actually quite small, and so on and so forth.. at the end you have an inventory of your closet (aka you as a person in case you didn’t get the metaphor) and learn to accept the good, the bad and the ugly. This way you can approach life knowing that some things trigger you, some things you don’t care much about, some things are to be cherished, and some things are not worth wasting your time on.
I’m no psychiatrist but this was my experience with 3 years of therapy, which honestly, saved my life. I’ll be eternally grateful to that psychiatrist
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