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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To start with: therapy isn’t recommended more than medication. Medication and therapy are seen as complimentary when undergoing treatment for mental illness. If you take medication but don’t go to therapy, you will feel better (once you get the right medication and dosage for you, which is a whole process in and of itself) but the underlying problem will still cause issues for you and you’re guaranteed to be on medication for life which isn’t always necessary for every person with a mental illness. If you go to therapy but don’t take prescribed medication then it becomes much harder to implement what you learn in therapy outside of the therapist’s office (which is where the most of the “healing process” will occur). To get the best of medication or therapy you will want the other.
As for how does therapy help: the brain is more malleable during adulthood than people realise. Originally neuroscientists thought that once you finish puberty, the brain was like a clay tablet left out in the sun. You can write on it and change it for a while but once it hardens then everything is set in stone. However this is only partially true: the brain is more “plastic” in childhood and as you undergo puberty but it can still be altered after you become an adult. Therapy provides a safe space for you to try and “rewrite” the clay tablet that is your brain/mind (which is where learning effective and healthy coping mechanisms come in to challenge harmful thinking patterns).
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