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benrussack-blog · 5 years

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So why, exactly, do I need therapy?

“There are two types of people: those who need therapy and those who can benefit from it.”

Topping out at six foot five, the old man stared down at me from his tall chair with the gravity of a king from some ancient world. In 1989, at the age of fifteen, I became the patient of Seymour Radin MCFF, a Jungian analyst from Petaluma, California. As a man who had come of age during the Great Depression, Seymour had more than a few good stories, as well as good ideas, to pass down to me. Over two decades later, I still went to see him once a week.

“Can you expand on that, please?” I asked, knowing full well that he would not.

Throughout my adult years, I have spent an inordinate amount of time breaking the encryption of Seymour’s aphorisms. Only two types, really? If so, which type am I? The more I deconstructed the old man’s sentiments, the more I believe really no one should go: A person who needs therapy but clearly isn’t benefitting from it, has no business remaining in treatment. Furthermore, those who benefit but don’t actually need it have little cause to even bother going in the first place. Sadly, when further pressed, Seymour did little else but wait stoically with ancient, folded hands as I talked my way (stammered, really) through my own exasperated thoughts. Nevertheless, from this confounding chunk of so-called wisdom I now extrapolate the following:

The benefits of therapy, or perhaps the needs therapy serves are multifaceted. On a basic, day-to-day level, therapy opens us up to new ways of thinking and feeling about life’s challenges, ultimately assisting us to make better choices in the moment. That is, we learn to ask ourselves better questions, such as, “Should I go with my anger, which I know is a big issue of mine, and lay into my sister for failing to mind her own business, or should I express my dissatisfaction with her behavior honestly and authentically and without using hurtful language?” Normally, an individual holding on to a lot of anger would not even consider the second option. The same applies for someone managing difficulties such as depression, anxiety, or a lack of adequate communication skills. This is where therapy can help. Therapy can help us make the better choice.

Another way to improve our ability to make better choices is to figure out what we actually want. Towards this end, I often challenge patients to imagine the life they desire and work with them to remove the perceived barriers between themselves and what they want, or at least a realistic version of what they want. That means learning to replace “I want to sing like Selena Gomez” with a more realistic goals such as “I want to one day sing competently before a large and appreciative audience.” Fortunately, the barriers around us are largely self-created and, with a bit of focus and insight, they may be broken down or at the very least hopped over.

Again, do we need to make better choices, or are better choices available only to those who are simply able to benefit from them? Seymour once said to me, “I would stand on my head if I thought it would make you feel better.” That one, at least, made some sense: While therapy can’t solve all of your problems, as your therapist, I sure wish it could. Also I related to this statement on a personal level. Like Seymour, and as a therapist myself, I simply want to help people any way I can.

On a more internal and decidedly less measurable level, therapy is also about growth. This may be exasperating to hear, but just stay with me, even if this kind of talk isn’t your jam.

On its face, growth is a non-quantifiable process. Consider, for example, the difference between a child falling down and scraping his knee and an adult doing the same: The injury may be identical, but the manner in which the pain is handled is entirely different. That is, as we grow, we tend to be less affected when things do not go our way. Edward Edinger, a Jungian philosopher, described growth as an “Expansion of Personality.” Think as a childh, whose world one day may have briefly fallen apart as you sailed over a pair of handlebars and painted the curb with your knee. That child was still you, but a different you. A lesser version of you. Another way to think of growth is the experience of an increase in consciousness. Though Edinger also said that consciousness is impossible to define, we usually know an increase—or decrease—in consciousness when we see it. Usually such a shift happens incrementally, slowly and nearly invisibly, over many years. But sometimes it comes all at once, usually in a cathartic, painful fashion.

Here is yet another Seymourism:

“If it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t true.”

Ouch.

This brings us to the next obvious question: How do I grow? Well, picking up the phone and getting yourself into therapy might be one way to go about doing that. There you may experience growth by vocalizing events or feelings you have never spoken of before. Think of how physical therapy works. During recovery from a significant injury, often a part of the body has atrophied or is failing to heal due to lack of use—that is, due to lack of blood and energy reaching that space. Once it does so, the body’s natural healing processes will finally be able to tend to the injury. The same applies to the mind. A childhood trauma, which is probably far more serious than a bicycle accident, may too atrophy aspects of our psyche. As an adult, it is as though certain memories and feelings are blocked up, penned in, unable to be released or processed. For example, I once knew a woman who refused, under any circumstances, to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. This phobia was understandable, as she had been nearly killed several years prior during a head-on collision on the same bridge. It was as though the psychic wound left by the accident never fully healed—or never healed at all. The memories were too painful to relive and therefore remained unchanged, fragmented and stuck within her. In theory, talk therapy might be one way for her to process the accident and shepherd those horrific memories towards the light, thereby allowing the natural healing processes of her heart and soul to do their work.

On the other hand, I feel the term trauma to be somewhat limiting, as it may pathologize the patient. For while exposing buried and traumatized parts of ourselves is essential for deep change, I am less interested in how you were traumatized and more so in how you were Shaped.

Allow me to explain:

Shaping refers to any childhood, teen and early adulthood environmental pressures or events, traumatic and otherwise, that Shaped your personality. Your Shape is akin to a hillside tree whose trunk and branches reach out in strange angles due to the steep gradient and strong winds. Like yourself, and so many of us, though the tree may appear different or odd, it is perfectly functional. A Bonsai figures into this analogy as well: A fully mature, entirely healthy entity appears to us in miniature due to a lack of available earth in which to spread its roots.

My job as your therapist is to discern your Shape.

When we discover our Shape, we can know our Work.

When we know our Work then we can Grow.

Imagine a household which eschewed and repressed all discussion and expression of feeling, a household where crying was a form of weakness and anger a capital crime. A child reared in such an environment may be Shaped into someone with an oversized focus on intellect. Think of a Spock or the Trekian android, Commander Data. Think of a man who tries to solve every problem instead of addressing how his partner actually feels. Work with such a patient may involve simply helping him get out of his own head and accessing his feelings, his body, or his intuition. The Work of this patient is to explore, access and utilize the realms that thought does not touch. It is my belief that such a practice will initiate Growth.

Here is another example: A friend of mine is currently undergoing a long and protracted divorce. A self-described feeling type, this person leads with her emotions. Her decision tree is less influenced by cold reasoning and more so by her mood or inner temperature. As the divorce dragged on, visions of repairing the marriage kept cropping up for her. Every time her soon-to-be ex showed the remotest bit of decency, she would attempt to reconcile to give him another chance. Every time, of course, his old habits would swiftly resurface: belittling, dismissing, ignoring. (A real catch, no?) His intermittent kindness reminded her how much she actually loved him. In those moments, her thought process would go something like this: “Today I love my husband, therefore we should be together.” In this instance, my friend’s executive functioning—that is, the driving seat of our decision-making process—was being guided by her emotional world. Feeling was the rule.

I recommended my friend write herself a letter about what she should do and not do the next time one of these moments cropped up. In the letter, she could also describe in detail her husband’s true character, this shadow of a man who occasionally threw her his scraps of kindness. I asked her to write from her more grounded, thinking self to her less grounded, feeling Self, a Self that was clearly suffering from feelings of abandonment and hurt due to the steadily crumbling marriage. Postmarked from the realm of thought and addressed to the land of emotion, this measure of Work would hopefully allow my friend to access her thinking function during times of emotional turmoil.

(Note: I do not mean to imply that feeling is any worse or better than thought. Rather, in a well-balanced personality, the two work in concert to arrive at optimal solutions.)

So what happens when we discover our Work and begin to Grow? What changes, exactly? Here is a straightforward but woefully incomplete list: make better choices; attract healthier, kinder people; learn to better and deeply appreciate and experience our lives on a day-to-day level; increase our vulnerability; increase our capacity for intimacy; acquire a broader, stronger community; learn to ask for help; increase our productivity and therefore income; increase our well-being; gain a wholly unquantifiable sense of inner growth and increased consciousness; feel a sense that you have taken the red pill.

Let me bring all of this to a personal level: as a child, and well into my teens and twenties, I was deeply socially maladaptive and grossly overweight. As one may well imagine, such a platform proved to be the source of considerable strife in my adult life. Dating, friendships, income, self-image—nearly everything was affected. By age twenty-eight, I lacked self-confidence, had formed very few friendships and had had even fewer girlfriends. I feared conflict and in both public and private arenas I felt constantly unsafe and physically vulnerable. How I came to be this way, how I grew into this Shape, is not germane to this discussion. Needless to say, my Shape stood out in stark relief: to anyone with eyes, my pathology was obvious.

Then one day, some time after my twenty-ninth birthday, a friend (a real friend, the kind who cared enough not to listen to my BS) dragged me to an introductory class in Brazilian jujitsu. The next day, I quit my gym and never looked back. This extremely intense, full-contact grappling art afforded me several opportunities, all of which were connected to my Work. First of all, daily controlled conflict built my self-confidence. In addition, the high-contact sport allowed me to blow off a considerable amount of repressed anger, which I am sure was stunting my emotional and psychological development. Jujitsu also whipped me into the best physical shape of my life. Lastly, and probably most importantly, I benefited from the tight brotherhood that forms amongst Brazilian jujitsu players.

Let me paint a picture of the Growth I have experienced due to fifteen years of hard training and focus on my Work: Today I am one hundred pounds thinner; I am part of a vast community of truly fabulous men and women; I feel safe, confident and centered in just about any situation. After fifteen years, I can finally hold my head up and smile. I would call that progress. And am I saying that jujitsu is the answer to everyone’s prayers? Well, no (but really yes and hell yes), but let me add that during this fifteen-year stint I partook in a host of other activities related to my Work: I attended therapy, started dating and went back to school for an advanced degree in Counseling Psychology. I mean, who knows, maybe the jujitsu didn’t do a damn thing and my self-improvement came from digesting all those god-awful textbooks. Regardless, whether it is simply talking it through with a professional, analyzing our dreams or swimming the Strait of Gibraltar, like countless streams filling a vast reservoir, our growth may come to us from a thousand directions.

In the years before his passing, I would spend hours with Seymour on his vast, serene ranch. I can’t stop picturing his hands, stiff and crooked from his street fighting days during the Depression, and how he stared at me with a mixture of determination and compassion from beneath a set of white, overgrown eyebrows.

So folks, need or benefit?

Even now, I still can’t say which camp I belong to, and I have stayed awake nights wondering if there is truly a difference. Perhaps that’s what he meant, that there are no differences, that therapy is for everyone, that there is really only one type of person, and only one way this goes:

Shape. Work. Growth.

That’s everything I know.

Now give me a call.

#marriage #therapy #therapist #relationship #counseling

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