Therapy is work

Sometimes people aren’t ready for therapy. They think they are. They make the phone call, schedule the appointment, show up and answer the first session questions. But then, when the work really begins, it turns out they’re just not ready to do it.

I confess, I have sometimes been one of these people who thought I was ready and then… wasn’t. I have walked into a therapy session, confident in my ability to get down to business, and then discovered it’s actually really hard. And I didn’t always have the bandwidth to do the hard stuff.

There’s no shame in that. It’s just a fact: if you aren’t ready to really look at yourself and do some work with what you find, you aren’t ready to be in therapy.

Notice I wrote that the work is “on yourself.” This is an important distinction: some people come to therapy because they want to change someone else. They want their marriage to get better, their mother to apologize, their best friend to commit to something important. But that’s not what therapy is for. You are the person in the room. You are the one who has to look at your own stuff and figure out what to do with it.

There are a lot of reasons not to commit to that; it’s expensive, it’s time consuming, it’s emotionally taxing. And yet, when you are ready, when you have the time and the resources and the mental and emotional space, it can be life changing. So if you aren’t ready now, take heart: you will be one day. And when you are, you are going to do great work.