Meet Your Head
My first foray into psychotherapy happened when I was twenty years old, and three years after my sister’s death. I didn’t know which end was up. Young and naïve, I only knew that I needed to fix what was going on in my head. What was going on in my head was a depression that would take time to unravel and understand in its fullness.
My first therapist was just who—and what—I needed to help me start the process of looking into my head. No drugs: just a great deal of talking. While my mother and my paternal grandmother showed some signs of depression, it wasn’t severe enough to put them in bed or hospitalize them. They were just depressed at times. And so, I talked to the nice therapist, and slowly I began to get to a better place. I’d move on and do some less intense work around specific issues with other therapists. I’d do the therapy that the state of California required me to do for my license—but by then I knew the value of what insight-oriented therapy could deliver.
I’ve always been one to think and to hold self-improvement as a value in my life. Therapy is for looking under the hood and making sure it’s all working well. Therapy is about making changes that will make what is under the hood function better. Solving a crisis is not therapy. While a therapist can help you locate the right resources for the crisis, after the crisis is over is when you need to stay in the process and look at what the crisis taught you, and how you can learn to avoid other crisis situations. OR how to deal with similar situations in the future.
For example: if you’ve had two failed marriages and you’re the common denominator, the question becomes: Did I play a part in things, and how did things get to where they are now? The reader might ask about abuse. Abuse is a different post.
Psychotherapy is about knowing yourself in new and wonderful ways. It can be served up as a bowl of warm and flavorful soup that has loads of good things for you to enjoy. OK, it can also be hard emotional work. Hard emotional work is also good for us as we explore what is in our heads.
Over the past two years I’ve been in the process of discharging trauma. I’ve learned that trauma can be a difficult thing to sit with alone, and there are times when you, alone, must face the truths of trauma and its creation. The end result is that I can say I know myself better, and I am glad I’ve been on the soul journey. I went into this round of self-exploration because of two “I almost died” experiences in 2023. When you are alone in a hospital room, and you don’t find out until after the crisis just how bad it was, you start to re-evaluate things.
I’d been putting off the work that I knew needed to be done. I, like so many others who deal with trauma, stuffed it away and said to myself that I’ll do it when the time is right. News flash: it’s never the right time!
In my case it took too much of one medication to send my body into a place it really didn’t need to go, and once I got out of the hospital, I had the epiphany that maybe, just maybe, I should do the work on my head that I’d put off. And so, I took my own advice that I gave to others and researched into someone who I felt I could work with. I began to meet my head in new ways. I decided to exit the stuff-it club.
While a crisis caused me to head back to a therapist, I wasn’t in crisis. What I was in was a realization that I didn’t want to go on like I was going on. I told the therapist I wanted to not be seen as a therapist, and to allow them to make the clinical calls that needed to happen.
Psychotherapy isn’t about fixing: in most situations it’s about coming to an understanding of ourselves. My job as a therapist is to ask good questions that will make you think and cause you to search within yourself and grow. The part you play as a client is to show up with an agenda, to do homework if that is something you agree to, and to gain the insights you need so that you can move forward and, if needed, return for other reasons.
While it is true that some forms of therapy such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can enable you to conquer a fear or phobia, and enable you to move on in life with that new skill, insight therapy is all about knowing yourself better.
Therapy might start due to a crisis and might continue on beyond that, because once out of the crisis, the discovery is made that “WOW, I could learn more about myself.” Getting inside your head is useful.
Way back when I got into therapy in the 1970s, it was all psychodynamic and process oriented, and I found something useful. Decades later, I’m finding that the art of asking useful questions and building a relationship based on respect and trust is what this thing called therapy is all about. In the process of the asking and the answering of questions, hopefully both of us, as therapist and client, will be meeting our heads in new and wonderful ways.
