On therapy

Generally speaking, therapy is a scam. Psychotherapy has all the makings of a ponzi scheme. You get initiated by an acquaintance who claims therapy changed their lives. When probed about the cost-benefit analysis, said acquaintance assures you that while the price of entry might be high, therapy, as you will certainly come to see, is one of the best investments you can make for the benefit of your self. From the moment this one person shares their experience of therapy, other testimonials start creeping out from around the most unusual corners of your daily life. While you rarely, if ever, watch talk shows, on a particularly gloomy Sunday morning you happen to tune in on one and find yourself listening to a confession of a respected journalist extolling his long-term commitment to therapy. At the airport, you bump into an old colleague who confesses they’d been going to therapy for years, ever since a family feud that ensued after the death of the land-owning patriarch. The once strange and discomforting idea of paying money to a stranger to listen to your innermost thoughts and feelings slowly starts taking a more mellow, rounded shape in your mind. You start doing the math in your head. How much would a weekly commitment cost, could it be a monthly thing? Does it make sense to do it once a month? You vaguely remember one person saying that consistency is key, while another said that even one session could have life-altering effects. In the end you decide that, while there must be something to it, you’re really not in a financial position to be able to commit to therapy. Especially not in this economy. And but so then something happens. Something truly terrible, something that displaces your sense of self and upends what you thought, all the ups and downs notwithstanding, had been a relatively stable emotional life. This something leaves you feeling detached, floating, uprooted from the predictable everyday you had up until now consumed without complained. The first sum of money you spend on therapy buys you the word with which to describe this something. It is trauma. The next dozen instalments buy you the assurance that you are the victim, not the perpetrator of said trauma. By the end of the first year of therapy you forget about the inciting trauma, for a number of other, more pressing issues have reared their heads out of their safe and cozy hiding grounds. By now you have paid a substantial amout of money only to unearth problems you weren’t even aware existed. It’s like going to a safari through your subconsious, the old acquaintance with whom you’ve now developed a friendship over your shared senses of self-discovery, jokingly says sipping their third cocktail of the night. You have become fluent in the lingo of psychotherapy and you are unafraid to brandish terms like persona, attachment style, reflection, projection, thought and behaviour patterns and many more. Others’ faults of character have become more apparent now that you can put labels next to what used to be unnameable frustrations. It has become difficult to have a conversation with those people. You set your sights on this one friend who appearas to be in dire need of help. The word unenlightened appears to be hovering in a square speech bubble above their head. You can’t shake the feeling of wanting to help them. Help them see what they’ve been hiding from themselves for so long. It’s never too late to start, you tell them. Your therapist is great, but she’s not taking any more patients. Clients, you correct yourself. This thing that you are feeling is not a sickess. You elaborate on the difference between psychologists and psychiatrists. You tell the friend to think of the first as an educated and emphatic friend-for-hire whereas the latter is a medical doctor that treats patients with severe mental health issues. You insist that there is something liberating of being able to pay for another person’s undivided attention for sixty minutes a week. But you urge them not to view it in purely transactional terms. It will enable you to get in touch with parts of yourself that you weren’t aware needed attention. It’s a self-care thing. You really owe it to yourself to at the very least try. Opting out is always an option, you assure them. Sometimes even just one session can be life-altering.