Why therapy? Why now?
Sometimes patients get tired of therapy. They don't like spending the money, they don't see the point anymore, they would prefer to do something different for awhile, and you know what i tell them? Go do it! Take a break. Allow yourself to breathe. Contract with me that you will come four more times and then transition to something else.
But i am afraid, they say. What if I crack up? And this is what I tell them: if you do, call me. If you leave and you panic, call me. If you fear that you will go into emotional withdrawal, emotional denial, or on a spending binge that will put you into bankruptcy, call me. We can talk for a little while and help you come up with a plan.
I don't want therapy to be a prison OR an obligation, I want it to fun. I want it to feel safe. I want you to come because you feel better about yourself and your life when you do. To me, as a psychoanalyst, I believe that we all have layers of unconscious material we can draw upon in therapy, through our dreams and conversations, or in some cases through EMDR, to make us wiser, more creative, more resourceful. Many of us had our multiplicity curtailed, while growing up. We had parents who had had their own multiplicity curtailed, so they did to us, what was done to them. For example, someone artistic might have been told to be more serious, more academic, so they lost their flair for performing or worse yet, never even tried. Therapy is a place where we can reclaim some of those lost parts. Therapy ideally is a place where we can explore seeing ourselves the way we want to see ourselves., rather than the way we felt doomed to be regardless of our deeper wishes. Therapy should be a launching pad for a new version of us. If we are shy we might discover we are an incredible show off, we just didnt know it. If we are always showing off, we might discover that we do that to overcompensate for our shyness, that our shyness was punished at home, and our parents demanded a performance, and so we had no choice but to show off, for THEM!
These discoveries are something I think makes therapy fresh and new. If it loses that spark for you, if you feel you are not learning, you are not growing, tell your therapist. Decide on a plan. DO SOMETHING. Because life is too short for going through the motions, paying bills on time, without any creativity and coolness. Life is too short to be bored, with ourselves or others. Life is meant to be lived, and therapy is one place where you should feel alive above all else!!
