Day Eighty: Therapy

Therapy is often associated with words like....Weakness. Need help. Shrink. Depression. Anxiety. Troubled. Mid-Life Crisis.

Therapy is for the courageous.

The day we meet someone without baggage will never come. We all have a past, present, and future. We all have different ways of coping with things, and different ideas of what we find "normal". We all go through times of stress and times of elation, loss of loved ones, feelings of lonliness, natural growth and aging, illness, and death. Some of us learned healthy coping mechanisms during our childhood, when it was okay to make mistakes and learn from them. As adults, some of us haven't gotten the benefit of making mistakes nearly as much as we should have, and we may need a little practice or guidance.

We might make poor food and exercise choices. We might self medicate with chocolate or alcohol. We might use illicit drugs, try to control the outcome, or put ourselves into roles where we're always the victim. We might not know how to handle a situation, worry about our worry, or experience fear. We might have experienced the loss of our best friend and be filled with sadness and regret. We might be dealing with abuse we experienced as a child or things that we pretend didn't happen. We may have no idea how to express our needs, or be completely unable to draw healthy boundaries without constructing a wall instead. Usually, these are not the problem...they are often a result of something else that was/is present.

I believe that our food and exercise choices are just like any other choice we make...our decisions reflect our priorities and values that are manifested somewhere deep inside of us. If someone were to have skin cancer, the treating physician would not only scrape off the skin...they would dig deep until they found the source of the problem and removed it. Then, healing would occur from the inside out.

The same is true here.

The outward behaviors that we see are indicative of a priority, belief, or value inside of us. Compulsive eating, shaming ourselves, depression, addiction to substances, spending money we don't have, fear, and worry are all what we know because they are evident to us on the surface. Deeper down lies the root. Even if we're really good at hiding it from others, its there. Talking to a licensed therapist starts a process that helps us once we've made the decision that it's time to begin healing.

I challenge you to seek therapy if you feel that there are deep issues manifested inside that need to be worked through.