We are a highly-intelligent species and yet we are often not able to resolve or often even recognize the stuff going on in our own heads. Why is that?
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Everyone does “therapy” on themselves to some extent: there is just no guarantee that you are always the best therapist for the job. Just like with massage or physical therapy, there are spots that are hard, or impossible to reach without external help.
Also, a good therapist knows when to refer you to a doctor, or another therapist when the problem is not something they can address.
Sometimes doing therapy on yourself means deciding you need to refer yourself to someone else for treatment.
Why don’t you cut your own hair?
Because there are pieces of you that you cannot see due to the limitations of your perspective.
To take this metaphor even further, a therapist is like a large setup of mirrors that reflect in ways to let you see yourself from different angles, angles you’ve probably never seen before. The awkward thing is that you still have to cut your own hair, since the therapist can’t cut it for you. But with the therapists help, they can guide your hands to the right places and help you find the right angles to cut.
At the risk of breaking the metaphor, the end goal of a therapist is in helping you develop enough perspective that you can stand outside of yourself, like an astral projection or a clone, and see yourself more fully, decide what parts you like and trim the parts you don’t.
Because “everything in our heads” is actually everything in our body.
We believe that our brains think. But only part of our brain does that. The rest of our brain communicates with the rest of the body via chemicals. These chemicals are why we feel scared, happy, angry, hungry, aroused etc
Also, the chemical part of our brain forms shortcuts. If it sees the same person over and over again, it starts to remember what chemicals it used the last time it saw that person and immediately dumps those chemicals back into your body. This is why seeing a loved one triggers a warm feeling, or why you immediately tense up when seeing someone who annoys you.
Sometimes those shortcuts confuse the thinking part of your brain. Sometimes the short cuts overwhelm your thinking brain. Sometimes the shortcuts are hard to distinguish from other shortcuts.
But the worst part is that your brain doesn’t know the difference between its rational thoughts and the shortcuts. It’s all information and all the information looks the same or feels the same.
So if the chemical part of your brain makes a mistake, the thinking part doesn’t say “hey, you made a mistake,” it says “thankyou for that information. I’m glad I thought of that”
So a therapist can help you distinguish the short cut information from the rational information.
You could. But intelligence does not equal omniscience. The problem is that
1. You’re not a therapist, so you don’t really know what the source of your problem is, let alone how to deal with it.
2. Even if you were a therapist, you’re probably not in an unbiased position in regards to your situation. You have biases like it or not, and they will affect your decisions
Explain it like you’re 5…ok. I’m a counselor/therapist so I will do my best here.
You can do therapy “on” yourself. There are a number of books and self help guides available to help you through your hard times and your daily struggles. There are so many, that you can feel overwhelmed. They can be great resources, but only if you are looking at the right one.
Over all you are too close to your problem situation. When you seek a therapist, you are looking for a guide to help you that can talk back.
Therapists are trained in a way to present you the information you are missing. We listen to you objectively, from an outside perspective and offer directions that will benefit you and your situation the most. Some of the counseling may be completely obvious to us but outside your comfort zone of thought, and some things you may have tried before, but gave up on too soon. If you try something written in a book, but don’t get the intended out come within your expected time frame, you’ll assume it didn’t work. If you try the same thing with a therapist, they may be able to explain why it’s not working like you want, and tweak it in a way that it will.
Me: “I do X but everybody does X”
My therapist: “Nope, everybody does not do X”
Me: “Huh”
I’m reading the book, The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul and she explains this as well as many other things about how bodies and brains work (and how they don’t work).
Basically what she says is our brain is not a computer and it is not a muscle and it is not helping us to think of the brain this way. We learn and understand better when we do it with others because being social was advantages to us throughout time. We also have many things that our body does that give us information not just our brains. Therapist can also be a shortcut to revealing these things to ourselves.
Here is an interview with Ezra Klein- https://overcast.fm/+oiPU0IRr0
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