「黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui」 | (aka: 鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma)What advice/solutions did your therapy actually give you?
protistFor therapy to work for you, you have to show up for it in a big way. Therapy is work. Not only is it work, but you have to be ready to work, which often includes letting go of your ego and admitting to yourself what patterns you engage in that aren’t serving you well. While advice giving can occasionally play a small role in therapy, it is not therapy.
Counterintuitively, many people are really, really attached to their negative patterns that perpetuate feelings of anxiety or depression. They may say they’re unhappy, but they aren’t ready to do anything different to change that.
Maybe take a look at yourself and try to gauge your own readiness for change. If you’re not ready to acknowledge that you yourself play a huge role in how you feel, as is the case for everyone, therapy will not be productive. If you’re expecting a therapist to do the work for you, therapy will not be productive. If you’re not ready to do work to break out of patterns in your life outside of therapy, therapy will not be productive.
The thing that really helped me with therapy was actually taking in what my therapist told me and acted on it. The first couple months was spent just getting my insane levels of anxiety under control. Then he started helping me figure out how to deal my social anxiety but by bit by encouraging me to get into volunteer work or seek small group things. I could have just shrugged it all off and not done anything he wanted me to do, but then what was the point of going to therapy and wanting to get better? I’m in a significantly better place now than I was a year ago when I started cause I put in the work and none of it was easy for me. Many times I wanted to give up, stop showing up, and just go back to hiding away from the world, but I actively decided to do what I could to not do that.