… and why the wok can sometimes feel REALLY uncomfortable.
There are a lot of things therapists can do.
We can hold space, listen without (too much) judgment. We can help you identify & understand patterns that may have been difficult to see on your own because you’ve just been too close to them. We can teach you skills, offer different perspectives, help you process painful experiences & sit with you in some pretty uncomfortable places. We can help you understand yourself & your defense strategies. We can help you figure out what you ACTUALLY want. We can help you practice saying things you’ve spent your entire life choking down. We can help you build a relationship with yourself that is more compassionate, honest & grounded.
BUT there are some things that no therapist can really do.
Your therapist cannot control other people (or you).
I have wondered at times if I actually had a magic wand or remote control with a “make them act right” button if I would actually use it. Fortunately, those things don’t really exist, so I don’t have to make that decision. Even if they did exist, it’s not covered by my license so it would still not be a service that I offer.
Your therapist cannot make your partner communicate or show up differently. We can’t make your parents (or anyone else) respect you or be different. We can’t make your ex apologize. We can’t make your friend understand why what they did hurt you the way it did. We can’t make anyone accept your needs, wants, or choices. We can’t make anyone suddenly develop emotional intelligence & we certainly cannot make someone else do their own hecking therapy.
We can help you figure out what you want to do in response to those situations. We can help you identify realistic options, clarify (in some cases create) your standards, expectations & boundaries. We can help you process your feelings & prepare for difficult conversations.
There is A LOT we can do BUT WE WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO CONTROL ANYONE ELSE’S CHOICES.
Sometimes that’s a truth that is really hard to sit with because there can be a part of us that holds onto a tricky kind of (false) hope that says, “If I can just explain it the right way, love them enough, communicate better, or set the perfect boundary then MAYBE I can finally make them understand… and then they’ll change.”
Want to know a secret? That’s called “controlling”. Ouch. I know, it stings.
People change all the time, even when we don’t recognize it. There are no guarantees that people will change the way we want them to change. The therapeutic work isn’t in figuring out how to finally get someone else to change – it’s in figuring out what to do (or not do) if they don’t. (Pssst… those are boundaries).
That can be painful as all hell. It is also incredibly liberating.
Your therapist cannot guarantee an outcome.
Therapy isn’t a car wash or a vending machine. You don’t put in 6 sessions, push the “healed” button & wait for the container to drop to the bottom so you can grab it. Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately, humans don’t work that way. We are WAY MORE COMPLEX. There are too many variables.
As therapists, we can provide knowledge, support, skills, perspective & hold a space where you can do your own work. We can’t guarantee exactly what will happen as a result. Sometimes the work you do in therapy will help you repair relationships, sometimes it helps you realize that the relationship isn’t healthy for you. Sometimes you become more comfortable living in your own body while at the same time becoming significantly LESS comfortable when you realize you’re still tolerating things that you used to tolerate without thinking twice. Sometimes you feel better, a lot of the times – at least initially & when you’re uncovering new layers of ‘ick’, you’re going to feel worse. Sometimes you realize you don’t actually want what you thought you wanted. Sometimes the outcome you hoped for isn’t the outcome you ultimately choose.
THAT DOESN’T MEAN THERAPY FAILED – it just means you’ve changed. When you change, your life will change with you, one way or another. Isn’t that ultimately what you came to therapy for?
Your therapist cannot do the work for you.
We can walk beside you for however long you’re willing to let us hold that space. We can help you understand your internal mapping systems. We can gently point out when you’ve been walking in circles. We can help you notice that the “sidewalk” you’ve been on for the past however many years is actually a cliff – but YOU still have to walk.
Therapy is not something that happens to you while you sit & receive wisdom from the professionally licensed human across from you. You must be an active participant in the process (otherwise there’s not much we can do). That doesn’t mean you have to show up perfectly prepared with your feelings neatly organized with a 5-year healing plan. …really, please don’t do that…
You don’t have to perform being a “good client”. You can come in & just say what’s true for you even if what you’re coming in with is “I don’t know.” You can even tell us when you’re feeling angry with us! You can cry. You can laugh at things that probably aren’t actually funny. You can laugh at things that ARE funny. You can realize you were wrong about something. You can realize that your therapist was wrong about something – and bring it up (please, bring it up). You can be confused. You can be defensive. You can feel exhausted. You can have a really shitty week & show up anyway.
ALL of that is allowed.
Doing the work isn’t about performing. We don’t benefit from someone telling us what they think we want to hear. Doing the work is about becoming more honest with yourself & practicing at sharing that honesty even when it’s uncomfortable as hell.
When healing doesn’t feel good…
One big misconception about therapy is that if you’re “doing it right”, you should feel better immediately. Eventually, hopefully, yes, but it’s not likely to happen immediately. When you’re doing deep, meaningful therapeutic work (especially trauma recovery), you start experiencing emotions that you’ve spent years – or decades – avoiding, suppressing, minimizing, intellectualizing, or simply not having room for.
Anger.
Grief.
Sadness.
Disappointment.
Resentment.
Fear.
Guilt.
Shame.
Relief.
Even joy.
You may start noticing how often you’ve said ‘yes’ when you really wanted or needed to say ‘no’. You may realize something you considered “normal” was actually harmful to you. You may recognize that you’ve spent years carrying responsibility for things that were never yours to carry. You may become aware of patterns in your relationships that you don’t particularly like.
As you learn & embody the difference between values, standards, expectations & boundaries… then start holding your boundaries & discover that people who benefitted from your lack of boundaries (& super low standards if we’re being super honest) are not exactly going to be thrilled about your personal growth journey once it pushes back on them.
Weird, I know.
You may stop automatically rescuing everyone around you. You may stop apologizing for existing & having needs. You may discover that some of the anger you’ve spent years trying to “get rid of” is actually trying to tell you something important.
Are you ready for another uncomfortable part?
Awareness doesn’t always feel good & awareness alone isn’t enough to solve any problems we may be experiencing. In GI Joe when they said “Knowing is half the battle”… it wasn’t entirely accurate.
Sometimes it feels TERRIBLE.
There can be periods where you see the patterns clearly, but you haven’t entirely figured out what you’re going to do about it. You may even know what you WANT to do about it but find when you’re actually in the situation that your body kicks right back into the old cycle. That middle space can feel super disorienting, uncomfortable & upsetting.
Uncomfortable doesn’t automatically mean that it’s unhealthy, that it’s bad, or that you’re wrong. Sometimes the discomfort is a way for your nervous system telling you that something about how you’re experiencing the old pattern is actually new, that you’re changing, that you are feeling or experiencing differently & the discomfort comes from the uncertainty of navigating a new way of being.
Sometimes healing means grieving what you needed but didn’t get.
Therapy isn’t only about processing what happened to you. It’s also about processing what didn’t happen…
The ways that you needed a parent (or both parents) to show up but never got to experience.
That you feel like you had good parents but that those good parents still didn’t always show up the way you needed them to show up.
The childhood you deserved.
The relationship you thought would last.
The apology that may never come.
The potential in someone else that you got attached to.
The version of yourself you had to become so you could survive.
The future you hoped for but may no longer exist or may feel too far out of reach.
There can be a tremendous grief in realizing that understanding someone’s behavior doesn’t magically erase the impact the behavior has had on you. You can understand why someone hurt you & still wish they hadn’t. You can have compassion for someone’s limitations & still decide that you can’t have them in your life anymore. You can forgive someone without forgetting what’s happened & you can still have boundaries. You can love someone & recognize that loving them isn’t enough to make a relationship healthy or safe. You can understand someone’s trauma without volunteering to become collateral damage from it.
Those things can all be true at the same time. Therapy can help you hold those seemingly contradictory truths without needing to immediately pick one & throw the other one away.
Sometimes getting “better” means tolerating uncomfortable feelings instead of getting rid of them.
This is a BIG one. The goal of therapy isn’t to eliminate every uncomfortable emotion. Humans are supposed to experience them. Fear can help us maintain safety. Anger can tell us when a boundary is needed. Grief shows up when our love has nowhere tangible to go. Guilt can sometimes tell us when we’re getting out of alignment with our own values & standards. Sadness can be a part of loving deeply.
The goal isn’t to become someone who never feels bad. The goal is to be able to feel something difficult without automatically being controlled by it. That’s different. We don’t need to immediately fix anything – not every uncomfortable feeling is a problem that needs to be solved. The growth starts when we can simply notice: “This is here”, “What is this trying to tell me?” Maybe you don’t know yet – it doesn’t mean you’re failing. It’s okay to not have answers immediately.
Your therapist doesn’t get to decide what your life should look like.
This one matters. Therapists have training, we have knowledge & experience. We may notice patterns that you don’t see yet. Our perceptions may be missing something. We aren’t always right. We may challenge you, we will probably ask uncomfortable questions & sometimes we get it wrong. We’re STILL NOT THE CEO OF YOUR LIFE. Our job isn’t to turn you into the person we think you should be. It’s not to make decisions for you. It is not to impose our values on you. IT’s not to decide whether you should stay, leave, forgive, reconcile, divorce, quit your job, change careers, establish distance from anyone, or make any other major life decision.
Our job is to help you become more informed about yourself & your options so that you can make choices that are in alignment with your values.
Our jobs are about empowerment.
Empowerment means accepting that there are things we can’t control.
So, what can your therapist do?
A lot. We can help you understand yourself. We can help you hold space for yourself with tenderness. We can help you identify patterns. We can help you build skills. We can help you process experiences that are still affecting you. We can help you recognize the difference between what happened then and what’s happening now (or the similarities as needed). We can help you practice boundaries. We can help you explore what you actually want instead of what you think everyone else is expecting you to be. We can help you learn to tolerate difficult emotions without automatically reacting to them. We can help you be different with yourself. Maybe most importantly, we can sit with you when you’re going through some really hard stuff without telling you that you “shouldn’t” be feeling it.
We don’t have to make every painful thing disappear, sometimes we just need help to learn that we can survive feeling it until eventually we have space for something even more powerful…
You don’t need a therapist to fix your life (because you aren’t a broken toy).
You don’t need someone else to change (because you can’t control it anyway & it won’t actually do what you’re hoping it would do).
You don’t need to never feel uncomfortable (you’re human so that’s impossible).
You don’t need to have everything figured out all the time (again, you’re human, it’s impossible).
You need support, tools, self-awareness & the willingness to show up for yourself.
That’s doing the work. Yes, sometimes it’s really uncomfortable. Sometimes it pisses you off. Sometimes you question things you thought you already had figured out. Sometimes we grieve. Sometimes you feel angry. Sometimes you realize that the person you’ve been trying hardest to understand isn’t anyone else – it’s you. Sometimes, after years of survival, you discover that you don’t just want to survive your life anymore… you actually want to live it & be fulfilled.
I’m most interested in what you are willing to do for yourself that will help you be fulfilled. Not making you “perfect”, not putting a pretty bow on things & adding a positive spin. Not making you comfortable every second of every day… Helping you build the capacity to live your full life – with all the messy, complicated, beautiful, uncomfortable, very HUMAN parts that come with it.
