On Therapy

Context: I wrote this for a friend as an introduction to the process of therapy based on my experience

I want to tell you my experience with therapy, with the hope that if you’re feeling a bit off about something or if you have a feeling of unease emotionally, maybe therapy could help you as it helped me.¹

Over the course of my 20-odd therapy sessions to date (and counting), this is one idea I had to unlearn: A therapist is not supposed to solve your problems. A bad therapist will (probably) give you solutions, a good therapist will listen, and a great therapist will ask you pointed questions forcing self-reflection.

But then, what is the point of therapy if the therapist will not solve your problems for you?

Here’s how I think about this: In a best-case scenario, therapy may help you think about why you are feeling a bit off emotionally in a structured manner, aiding self-reflection and develop a better understanding of your situation.

At a difficult point in my life, I was confused about how I felt. I could not label the emotion but I just felt off.

My then partner had started therapy around that time and found it helpful. She suggested I give it a try. But I downplayed the idea for a long time.

My primary concern was that I knew my situation was layered; it had been influenced by many factors. How would a therapist, who would talk to me for an hour every week, help me solve my problems. But then, across the first few sessions, I slowly understood how to customise the process of therapy for myself.

In time, I understood that therapy has to be thought of as a process. It is not like taking medicine for headaches. It is more like acquiring a new habit. It takes repetition and trusting the process, along with some calibration. It is a function of how much you share with your therapist and how openly you do so, forcing you to self-reflect while communicating with your therapist.

Also, therapy needs an initial calibration between both parties. You need to tell the therapist if something is not working for you, and the therapist can modify the process to suit your style. While it is okay to change therapists if it’s not working for you, the switch should be done only after you try this calibration exercise (except if you get bad vibes right from the start of course which also may happen).

Another thing I realised much later is that for therapy to work, I have to let my guard down and not filter my thoughts as I express them. For many of my initial sessions, I would speak in very abstract terms with my therapist, never discussing specific incidents. Instead, I would share an edited version of the story I wanted to discuss. With time, I have learned to talk freely about emotions, feelings, how I reacted in a particular situation and how I think I should have responded.

Over the last many sessions, have I found therapy helpful? Of course.

Therapy, I feel, is a modern solution to a modern problem. My hypothesis is: earlier, we did not know any better about how to deal with our emotions. Our monkey brains evolved to react and not respond. But as we evolved into the present day, we no longer needed to hunt for food or procreate aggressively to survive. Still, our brains were calibrated for these behaviours².

Will it work for you? Maybe.

You will only know if it works for you if you give it a try with some intentionality. In my opinion, that is when you take the first step, book a session, and pull through the first set of initial sessions. While doing so, you share whatever you feel honestly and see where it takes you emotionally.

When you may not need therapy (or if you don’t want to commit fully now)

Suppose you have a feedback loop via some other mechanism (writing, talking to people who act as independent observers etc.); you may wish to try them before committing to therapy or in conjunction with therapy even for better results. Here I am listing a few good ways to start:

First, journaling. I have done this in different ways over the last few years. Since around 2012, I had a private blog (i.e. I started a blog on Blogger, but it is not public), and I used it to write all sorts of random thoughts, bad poems, ideas, rants and whenever I wanted to vent it out.

Inspired by CGP Grey’s idea of a quarterly life review, I would add a calendar event for the start of every quarter and reflect on the how, why, what etc. of my life. I would add these reviews to the blog too. Later, I switched to daily journaling in phases between 2016 and now. The last time it happened with a consistency of almost a year was since November 2022.

Did writing help? Only a little bit, because for a long time, I did not understand the role of this writing in my life. Earlier, I would write as a means of venting out. It was much later in life I realised the value of revisiting things I wrote and using them as markers of points of time in my life and how I felt then. These markers helped in the self-reflection.

Second, a good friend who can call you out on your bullshit can complement therapy, if not act as an alternative. This is a privilege; if you have someone in your life who takes on this role, you are lucky.

In my case, my friends (who were mostly guys) would respond to any expression of emotion in three ways:

• Chal chai pike aate hain (Let’s get some tea)
• Chal daaru pike aate hain (Want to grab a drink a drink?)
• Chhod na yaar, koi baat nahi (Let it go man!)

This is the typical range of discussion of emotions I have had in friendships with men over so many years. Now this could very well be that I did not experience a more profound, more emotionally mature friendship with men, but I was lucky enough to have one or two people in life who would just call out, critically examine things I say and argue it out rationally so I always had an alternate perspective (Funnily enough, these people who would call out my BS were mostly women, but that probably just a coincidence)

So if you write and reflect on your emotions, actions, and events of the world around you, maybe you are already doing what you could do with therapy. Likewise, if you have a friend or family member helping you in this process of self-reflection.

A note about books, videos etc.

Another possible resource that could help you think about what and how you feel could be books and/or videos. More often than not, you will find a lot of low quality resources. In this case, separating the little wheat from the large amounts of proverbial chaff will be challenging. I usually conduct extensive background research before picking up a book or watching somebody’s YouTube videos. I will find out what people say about that book on Reddit or YouTube comments; I will watch the author’s talks or try to independently verify whether the author and their work are legit, reliable and valuable. I also put a lot of emphasis on the author’s credentials (like I would prefer taking mental health advice from a trained medical professional or acadmic only).

In the recent past, I have found Dr. Julie Smith’s book and her short videos useful. This is my only recommendation, which is technically from the self-help category. Most other books I have found useful are from the world of fiction. Stories have a beautiful way of helping us see our lives through the lives of characters and situations in them, and I found them to be far more valuable and illuminating than almost all of the self-help style books (This is a rant for some other day)

Another good resource I found online is Dr. K’s videos. You may want to review his videos and pick up specific topics of interest though. He discusses aspects I don’t particularly agree with or like (like references to spirituality and Ayurveda). Still, for the most part, he discusses ideas rationally, and his videos contain a lot of useful content.

I listen to many podcasts; one I have deeply engaged with is called The Seen and the Unseen. Amit Varma discusses themes of journalling, mindfulness and therapy (among many other things) in some of his episodes. Some of my favourites episodes from the show discussing these themes are:

• Episode 265: Amitava Kumar Finds the Breath of Life
• Episode 301: Natasha Badhwar Lives the Examined Life
• Episode 299: The Reflections of Samarth Bansal
• Episode 303: The Loneliness of the Indian Man
• Episode 260: Sneaky Artist Sees the World
• Episode 314: The Life and Times of Jerry Pinto

Things to be careful about

First, as I mentioned before, therapy is usually not a quick and easy fix to your life’s problems. If used correctly and with caution, it can be a great tool to aid self-reflection and can help you understand your behaviour and change it if required.

Therapy is hard work. Because working on your mental health is really hard. You are fighting against bad habits you have acquired over the years in some cases. It’s like trying to quit smoking.[^4]

So, in the process of working on yourself through therapy, you may need to read independently about psychology, including frameworks to work through your feelings and how you may want to think about it and help yourself.

And doing all of this takes a lot of effort. You must take responsibility to find the right therapist, the technique that works for you. You may have to read up about psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology to answer any profound, fundamental question you may have about your behaviour or emotions. If you’re lucky, the therapist will point you to resources. Still, you will have to do the hard work of putting together the pieces. The therapist and, thus, the process of therapy is a means to an end and not the end itself.

Second, therapy is tiring. After talking, thinking and discussing so much, you will feel drained out, which is why it is usually recommended to attend therapy sessions once a week or once in two weeks. You need time for your thoughts to settle down and intentionally bring in small, incremental changes. All of this will tire you out. For you to know whether therapy worked in your case, it may take months before you see sustained progress. I have been going through this process for almost 8-9 months. Although I can see it working in a few instances (where I have been aware of how my behaviour or response to events have been guided by therapy), I think I will have to spend a lot more time before therapy-motivated frameworks of meta-cognition become second nature.

Third, therapy is expensive. Although there are many free resources online, access to good-quality therapy is usually expensive. And then, too, it may take time to find a good fit with a particular school of thought of therapy or therapist. If your educational institution or workplace covers therapy costs, it helps to a large extent. Talk to friends or colleagues for reviews of therapists they consult.

Fourth, it is easy to think of therapy as almost useless (in the short term) because, by itself, it sort of is. It could be a long time before you see results. Simply showing up for therapy is only a good first step and nothing else. It is a slow process and takes a lot of work, but there is a high chance that if you stick with it, trust the process, and go through it intentionally, it will (probably) work.

TL;DR

Try Therapy. It may look intimidating or even useless. But if you persist, trust the process and are intentional as you undergo therapy, it is a great tool to help you work towards better mental health.

Footnotes