Therapy Is Not Fun — But You Should Try It Anyways

There is no good reason not to give it a shot.

After almost a decade long struggle with my mental health, I finally gathered the courage to get myself into therapy and made a promise to myself that I would stick with it this time around. Here’s the story about what I learned on my therapeutic journey.

My first encounter with a psychologist was when I was around the age of 15.

My parents made me go there for their reasons and I wasn’t happy about it. At the time, with my rebellious teen mindset, terrible relationships within the family and the HUGE social stigma around mental health, I felt like I was being punished for something rather than being provided help.

Therefore, I was dealing with it in my own way which was simply being as incompliant as humanly possible. My answers to whatever the doctor asked me were consisting of “yes”, “no”, “hm”, “I don’t care”, curse words or silence.

I don’t remember how many psychologists and therapists did I have to go through as a teenager before my parents realized it was not going to work and stopped forcing me into it.

The reason why therapy didn’t work for me back then was mostly because I didn’t want it to work.

Fast forward to university.

I moved out to Prague to pursue a degree and my mental health deteriorated drastically from all the stress that inevitably came along with the student life.

Maybe Prague had the options and solutions that my little hometown couldn’t have provided back in the day, I figured and reached out for help once again.

Still having in mind how it went the first time around, I didn’t have much trust in the system so I got myself a private therapist that I paid out of my pocket. If they are paid better, they surely must be nicer, more professional and overall more helpful, right?

But back then, I didn’t know what problem exactly I was trying to tackle and I still wasn’t capable of talking about my life openly. And you cannot fix what you don’t acknowledge.

I felt like it was the therapist’s job to figure it out anyway, not mine.

In my mind, a good therapist was a perfect mixture of a mind reader and a life coach.

In my mind, I would just come to see them, vaguely talk about my childhood a little bit, they would write down their little notes and observations about my behavior and then tell me what’s wrong with me and what should I do to fix it.

That’s, of course, not exactly how it works in the real world. But during my university years, I wasn’t quite yet in the mindset that would allow me to accept this fact. So I quit as soon as the therapist said something I didn’t like, only a couple of sessions in. I didn’t even tell them I was quitting, I just stopped showing up one day. That experiment left me bitter and convinced that nobody could ever understand or help me.

Fast forward one and a half years ago.

Finally, I was grown up enough to make the commitment and try it for real. I wasn’t willing to pay for it this time around but I was willing to attend and talk. If the insurance covers it, I thought, I would be stupid not to at least try.

So I gave it another chance, found a new therapist and started all over again.

And once again, I hated it.

Me and my therapist, a fairly young woman who obviously lived a life very different from mine, we didn’t kick it off very well, to say the least.

In the beginning, my attitude towards her was as negative as ever and all I did was confront her with gotcha questions as if I was trying to prove to myself that she’s stupid and can’t do anything for me. I had my walls up higher than ever to protect myself from letting stuff out.

I didn’t allow myself to cry and whenever I felt like I was about to, I’d just shut down and transform whatever emotion I was feeling into anger that I would unleash on my therapist instead. I’d argue with her and be mean to her just because she couldn’t read my mind and she would sometimes guess me wrong.

Teary-eyed, I thought about quitting almost every single session. Some weeks, the only thing that made me still go see my therapist was the fact that I would get 2 hours off of work. But even with this fact in mind, I still never quite managed to keep my composure throughout the entire session.

According my therapist, that was a good thing.

She would always sympathize with me fully. She never gave up on me and still tried to help me out even though I often was a massive bitch to her.

She encouraged me to cry and let my emotions flow freely. And so eventually, I did. And she always offered me a perspective from which my perceived setbacks and failures to make measurable progress weren’t setbacks at all but rather steps that were necessary for me to be able to move forward.

It took a very long time but in the end, we did manage to develop a therapeutic bond accompanied by a certain level of trust. My therapist told me that maybe that was the single most valuable thing that happened throughout my year and a half with her. Building trust.

But after all this time, I still felt like I wasn’t making much progress.

And that is the thing that, out of all the uncomfortable things that therapy comes with, sucks the most. You don’t see your own progress. You might feel a bit better because of all the emotional work you do in therapy, but feeling better isn’t the true end goal here.

The ultimate goal is not only to improve your happiness, but it’s mainly to improve the quality of your life as a whole. To help you unlearn undesirable behavioral patterns caused by trauma and replace them with healthy ones, improve your decision making skills and give you the tools to fix your relationships with others and with yourself.

My therapist explained the therapeutic process to me as such:

When you start out in therapy, you are on the shore of a deep, scary lake and there are stairs there that lead you into the lake. As you go through the therapeutic process, you descend into the depths of the lake, one step at a time, until finally, you reach the bottom.

That is the first part of the process, where the therapist helps you unpack your past and get familiar with your traumas, problems, and issues. And the scary part is that, because it is in human nature to be scared of depths, the descent into the lake can take a very, very long time.

In the past, I always stayed within the safety of the lakeshore. I never actually got my metaphorical feet wet -until this time around.

But once you reach the bottom of the lake, you haven’t won yet. That part is supposed to be, quite literally, reaching your emotional rock bottom. And the metaphor gets even grimmer as apparently, at the bottom of the lake, there is a stake that you fall onto and stay there, pierced through and rotting. And the only way to unpierce yourself and start moving up and out of the lake is compassion.

Only when you allow yourself to feel compassion with your Self, only then you can fully heal from your past.

I most likely didn’t quite make it all the way to the stake at the bottom of the lake — I still need some more time. But I am close and I can see it now.

I received a text from someone I used to be close with the other day. Someone who I trusted enough to talk about my therapeutic journey quite often. It said something along the lines of “Your therapy obviously doesn’t work since you’re still crazy and you should kill yourself.”

And for the first time in my life, it didn’t actually make me think about suicide. In fact, it didn’t really spark any negative emotions at all. Instead, it made me feel proud that I work on myself so much while people who feel the need to say something as awful as that, clearly should but don’t.

It also prompted me to write this piece.

And that alone was the sign of progress I have been looking for all along.

Nowadays, I firmly believe that therapy is for everyone and that every single person in this world would benefit from it in some way. Even if you don’t think you’re struggling THAT much, even if you don’t think it is necessary. There is no such thing as too good or too cool for therapy.

I am glad that it is slowly getting normalized even in the part of the world where I’m from, but we as humans still have a lot of destigmatization to do. There is no shame in being in therapy. On the contrary, we should take pride in it. Just like eating healthy or working out, it means that we are taking good care of ourselves and that’s absolutely something to be proud of.

It’s not a pleasant experience. It takes lots of hard emotional work, reliving painful experiences and self-reflection. And yes, it might take a long time before you finally feel like you are getting somewhere.

But going to therapy means moving forward in life while not even giving it a shot means missing out on an opportunity to make yourself and your life better.

And if anything else, the fact that you are working on improving yourself and your mental health, that fact alone makes it more than worth it. It’s already more than most people can say they are doing for themselves.

So, if you have the opportunity to see a therapist, try opening your mind towards it and give it a chance. There is simply no good reason not to. The world would be a much nicer place if everyone went to therapy at least once in their life.