How does talking to a professional about your problems help you in any way? I’ve been in and out of therapy for years and I simply don’t find any use in it. I just tell the therapist about my emotions and my life, they try to be understanding and offer some very basic advice I already knew about. Why is therapy often recommended more than medication and thought of as a better solution when it’s literally just normal discussion that can’t change brain chemistry?
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The brain can very easily change the problem by rethinking the problem. Of course, some problems can’t be changed by just talking about them, but generally speaking, a good % of mental health issues relate to some pattern of thought or perception which can be altered. The therapist’s role is to help you alter it. Relying largely or solely on medication is a life-long deal for most.
Have you considered other therapy options? Sometimes a different therapist or different type of therapy can make a difference. I’m not suggesting your therapist is bad, or incompetent, but you kind of have to “click” with them. I’ve had some that helped a lot, but others not as much. Good luck.
Because mental health issues are sometimes biological in nature and sometimes more disordered or maladaptive thought patterns.
By changing your behavior, you can these thought patterns sometimes.
This is literally what cognitive behavioral therapy is.
So for depression, one thing that maintains it is perception. You tend to notice and remember the negative things more than the positive things. So a behavioral technique to combat that is a gratitude journal. Write down 3 things that you are grateful for every day, no matter how small. In doing so, you force yourself to acknowledge the positive things and as you practice, you notice that more and more and then your perception shifts from wearing “shit coloured glasses” to more normal ones.
Ergo, behavioural change leads to cognitive change, that is therapeutic.
That’s a really complicated question and I’m not sure I can explain it like you’re 5, but I’ll be as simple as I can.
Therapy is not just normal discussion. All disciplines of therapy have different ideas as to what the therapist actually does, but it’s never the same as a talk with a friend.
Here’s some overarching things that are usually held in common between therapies:
The therapist is non-judgmental. They will not tell you you’re wrong for the way you live.
The therapy is private. You don’t have to worry about what you share with them.
The therapist is trained. They went to school for this.
As for how it helps, well, that’s complex. A humanistic therapist would tell you they provide you with the self-confidence and self-esteem you need to know how to help yourself. A CBT therapist would tell you they teach you to change your behaviours and your thoughts will change too, or vice versa. A psychodynamic therapist would tell you they bring your unconscious problems to the conscious, where you could fix them.
(I am massively oversimplifying all three, of course!)
It sounds like you’ve had (bad) person centred therapy. Maybe you’d benefit from something different?
There are so many different kinds of therapy that it’s even hard to comment on this. But the idea of therapy is to layer a layer of internal dialogue on top of your chemistry, so to speak, so that you’re perhaps more conscious of what’s going on up there and can change direction ever so slightly. And a lot of stuff isn’t biology. I’m sure you have instances every day where you reframe a problem and suddenly it seems different or more solvable. Therapy can be the same thing. We are the absolute worst at understanding our innermost thought processes, so we need somebody external as a bit of a mirror and lens.
The trauma response that one faces day to day is rooted in the trauma that we experienced in the past by talking through and reflecting and reframing those experiences generally folks are better able to see themselves and their emotional distress in more realistic terms (it is almost impossible to see a situation for what it is when looking through the lens of fight or flight )just taking the time to walk through situations (some of which people often don’t ascribe much weight to in the fight or flight mindset) can truly be an important indicator of where there was dysfunction ,why there was dysfunction gives us an analytical tool too calmly see how a different response to that same emotional stimulus can play out allowing us to make different decisions that will be better for us
There’s something inherently therapeutic about once or twice a week sitting in a quiet room with someone who is willing to listen to anything you have to say with no interest in judging you as good or bad (and where you are free to talk about certain feelings or problems that trouble you).
Talk therapy, which was pretty much invented by Dr. Freud to remedy adult neurotic behavior, *may or may not be useful* to people seeking relief from suffering through altering their brain chemistry via the many medicines now available. All therapy is about adaptation, so you are bound to hear a lot said about matters that you already know — but Dr. Freud quickly learned that telling a client what was really at the root of their emotional problems did *nothing* to help them feel better or function better in adult life. Talk therapy is a process that, for many people, heals and helps. Therapists are not in the giving-out-advice business. They are in the listening business. This is a valuable thing in a world of talkers.
Your computer can self-troubleshoot certain very simple problems. When a problem runs deeper and involves the computer’s own troubleshooting software, that may not be as reliable, and so it may be time to call IT.
The human brain typically learns by trial and error. You touch boiling water, it’s hot, you get burned, now you know. Your body reinforces these lessons through emotions and physical sensations. So maybe in the future you’re nervous or shaking around hot water / drinks.
The human brain isn’t perfect so sometimes it comes to incorrect or unhelpful conclusions. If your brain makes you nervous around all hot liquids, then you might avoid to cooking, bathing, making or buying tea or coffee to avoid feeling anxious. That’s a very limiting bit of trauma that your brain cooked up to protect you.
Ideally, a (cognitive behavioural) therapist will help you engage with trauma to help understand what happened; why you might feel the ways you do; and what a better, more compartmentalized lesson to take away from that experience might be. Not all hot liquids are automatically going to hurt you, you just need to be careful boiling water in a pan on high heat without a lid.
I’m going to disagree with other posters and say it’s HARD! It’s difficult to change how you think, your brain will want to stick to what it already believes. But I have found it helpful in feeling less insecure, and in making fewer generalisations.
You’ve gotta find a therapist who gets you (I was lucky. Some of my friends, though? Many, many tries); You’ve gotta actually tell the therapist your thoughts, all the way down as close to the deepest you can go; and you’ve gotta practice– “It only works if you let it” is pretty trite, but unfortunately perception and reality are pretty close neighbours when it comes to the brain.
Trauma therapy specifically tries to help you process the ‘stuck’ memories. The experience and memories will suck, but once they’re unstuck you won’t get the more severe symptoms like flashbacks.
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