Do I need therapy?

Consider these things:

• • Do thoughts of what is bothering you run through your head all the time, interfering with your daily life?

  • Do you feel that you are spending all your time with your friends and family talking about what is bothering you and you never feel any relief?

  • Do strong and intense emotions interfere with your daily life on a regular basis

  • Do you struggle to control impulsive behaviors that are ruining or negatively impacting your life?

If you answered yes to any of these things, you may benefit from some therapy.

Therapy can be long or short term. It can focus on one particular issue, or encompass many. It can be focused on changing behavioral patterns or unhealthy thought patterns or help a person work through a traumatic history. It can even be pharmaceutical, alleviating emotional distress caused by a chemical imbalance.

This plethora of options can be helpful but also can be difficult for people to navigate. The basic question usually boils down to: do I need therapy? But before this question is reached, we often gloss over an even more important question: What do I think of therapy?

Therapy itself can feel stigmatizing. Many people feel that if they need therapy there is something “wrong” with them as a person. For some reason, we think that we should be able to deal with our own emotional problems on our own and if we need help from the outside that makes us “weak”, “wrong”, or “incomplete” somehow. We feel that we are exposing things that a “good” person would be able to keep private to another person because we are not strong enough to deal with it on our own.

This is just not the case. Human beings use informal therapy all the time by socializing, venting, and talking with each other. We use our significant others, siblings, friends, and relatives to help us sort through our problems and find answers to difficult questions in our lives. The only real difference between this and going to therapy is that therapists specifically target the issues that their clients are dealing with using techniques that have been found to be most useful.

Therapy is basically a very intensified version of normal support that every human being gets from other human beings all the time. This is useful to know to answer the question about needing therapy or not needing therapy. Therapy is most useful when you are not feeling that you are being adequately supported by your regular social group. This can be because of difficulties in the group or in relationships or because what you are dealing with is just too intense or overwhelming for both you and them.

To this end, the true answer to the question is as personal as therapy itself. Basically, therapy is most useful when you and your support group are overwhelmed. What may overwhelm you can be unique. If you support group and you are equipped to deal with whatever is bothering you, you may be the best medicine for each other. On the other hand, issues may be too overwhelming and then therapy would be useful.