TRANSCRIPT
The first and most important reason that I never tell people that they need to go to therapy is I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that anybody needs therapy. Now, I do believe that therapy can be very useful to some people some of the time. And actually, more than I believe it, I know it because I have seen it. Especially as a therapist, I have seen many people in many different kinds of situations who have actually benefited greatly from therapy.
Now, the reason I see that people don’t need therapy is because I think there’s so many things in life aside from therapy that can be incredibly beneficial to people. And I don’t like to tell people that they need to do this one specific thing when I know for a fact that there’s so many other things that can be so incredibly helpful to so many people who have exactly the same problems that other people got helped from in therapies.
And then it brings me to this interesting idea. It was after the Asian tsunami, I believe in the year 2005. Is that what it was? Around Christmastime 2005 when that tsunami hit. And oh, what was it? Two hundred and fifty thousand or something people died in it. Well, I was summer. I think it may have been in Indonesia. Maybe it was Thailand that all these foreign aid workers and foreign medical workers and foreign psychological workers came in to help the victims of this terrible tsunami.
And what they did, if they said so many of these people need therapy, and tons and tons and tons of people were going to therapy because of this idea that they said it’s obvious our outside perspective with these people need therapy. If anybody needs therapy, it’s going to be these people. They’ve gone through an incredible crisis, an incredible natural disaster.
Well, what they found, from my memory, is actually therapy was not very useful. And yet there was something else that was very useful, very, very helpful. And what it was, and it wasn’t therapy at all, it was just being reconnected with their communities. It was being with other people who they knew from their social structures, from their lives, maybe even their whole nuclear families or whoever they knew close, close. And they lived with worse, dead to get to them with their other people in their more extended family, other people who they knew from their history, their old neighbors, and just sit with people, be with people, rebuild their communities on a social and emotional level. And that actually helped people. And is that what they needed? I would go so far as to say yes.
They didn’t need to be with some outside person who maybe didn’t even speak their language at all and required a translator to do this fancy, expensive form of therapy that we all wish so much for in our Western world.
But then that’s another thing. I think of a few different times in therapy when I worked with people who were parents, and they told me, “My son or my daughter needs therapy. She or he has to go to therapy. He needs deep therapy.” And I’ve argued them immediately and say, “No, no, no. Your son or daughter does not need therapy. Your son or daughter does have certain emotional needs and needs certain things, but does not need therapy.” And the person is like, “Well, what do they need that if they don’t need therapy?”
I might say they need someone to listen to them. They need someone to talk to. They need someone who they feel safe with. They need someone who’s a good role model in their life. Good therapy can provide that, but lots of other people can provide that. And then the client might say to me, “Well, who could that be?” And I said, “You. They need a parent.” What you’re really describing, and I think often when children especially get told, “You need to go to therapy. Oh, you’ve had this experience that’s so terrible. Only therapy will help,” often what I see is this child has no good parental role models in their life. And maybe the idea is there a therapist is the only person who can fill that role in of being a good parent, as it were.
But a little more on this idea of needing therapy, and part of why I bring it up is at a few different points in my life, people have told me that I needed therapy. And you know what? I took it as a real insult because I never believed that I needed therapy. But what did I need? What I found ultimately is when I couldn’t find people in my life who loved me and respected me properly, who really cared about me, who gave me a safe place to talk about myself and be me, who could be really honest about who they were in relationship to me, being honest about talking about who I was, really good safe healthy relationships. Because I tried many, many times for many, many years to build those relationships, I just couldn’t for all sorts of different reasons. Sometimes it was my own personal internal flaws, and sometimes it was just that I couldn’t find any people like this outside in the world.
Well, some of those times, first I actually did go to therapy, and I did try to get those needs met. I did follow this advice, “You need therapy,” because I thought, “Well, maybe it’ll work.” And you know what? The problem for me is it didn’t work. So if I needed therapy and I tried and it didn’t work, well, maybe I didn’t need it. And it crossed my mind, “Well, what else could I use?”
And what I discovered is there was a magical thing that no one had ever suggested to me because I don’t think anybody in my life had ever really tried it in a deep and assiduous way. And that was something that I’m gonna call self-therapy, or maybe a different way to put it is self-love, self-healing, self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-study, self-investigation, journaling, looking at myself, exploring myself emotionally, looking at myself in the mirror and saying, “Who am I? What am I? What’s going on in there?” And learning to love myself, learning to care about myself, learning to really listen to myself, listen to the inconsistencies in my argument, learning to analyze myself, self-analysis, not in any sort of Freudian way with all sorts of weird theories, but just listening to how I feel, trying to figure out where my feelings come from, listening to where are my blocks really, watching myself throughout the day, having a third eye on me, really trying to listen to my intuition. How do I really feel? Why do I again? Why do I feel this way? And why do my feelings sometimes contradict other feelings that I have? Also trying to make sense of my history. All these things really I found were far, far better than any therapy I ever got from an outside therapist.
And I might even go so far as to say the self-therapy, as it were, that I gave myself, the self-analysis, self-exploration, led to a degree of self-actualization, of inner integration that was better than I think I was even able to give my clients. And part of why is I was really able to profoundly tailor it to myself. And also what happened as a result of this is I gained an ally through this internal process of doing self-therapy. An ally who was really there for me and never left, who I didn’t have to pay anything to. I never had to apply to an insurance company. There was really deep and profound and full confidentiality. And also, no matter where I was, this so-called therapist was always there with me because it was me. It was me having a relationship with me, me learning how to heal myself. And also this person who was helping me, this person who was loving me, who was caring about me, who was looking back at me with a very critical eye in a way, but a loving critical eye, a constructively critical eye, who wasn’t faking me, who wasn’t saying things just to make me feel good, but was really looking at my flaws and looking at my strengths and being honest about both.
This me that I was developing, the strong relationship with me, this other me, this became a model for this is who I want to have in my life. I want to have other people like this. This was the role model that I wanted.
To build the stronger relationship with me, this other version of me, this therapist me, I realized when I saw other people in the outside world who had certain qualities that this person had, they treated me in this respectful way. I wanted to be closer to those people. I grabbed toward them, and I also treated them with that level of respect, of honesty, of openness.
What I found is it was so, so, so much easier for me to develop strong, bonded, caring, loving, and meaningful, purposeful social relationships with these kind of people, where they benefited and I benefited.
So in a way, my childhood in many ways was like that Asian tsunami. It crushed things. It killed. It was destructive. It crushed whole sides of me. It ruined so many things in my life.
And I didn’t need to go to talk to some random outside therapist who was paid to be there or maybe was just in it for the grandiosity. Because I think a lot of therapists are in it for the grandiosity. They love the power. They love being the important ones who get to be the healing one in the relationship with this person who’s lost and confused and vulnerable and needs their help.
Well, in a way, by me learning to love myself, I set the stage for me being able to build the social relationships and rebuild social relationships in my life that was far better than any sort of therapy.
So when I hear people say, “Oh, you need therapy,” I wince at it. I said, “No, you don’t need therapy.” And people often ask me, not infrequently actually, “Do I need therapy? Please be honest. Do you think I need therapy?” And I think absolutely 100% you do not need therapy. I tell people that all the time, and I will never tell you you need therapy.
However, I will say if you find a good therapist who you really connect with, who you really respect, who’s really on your side, you really might benefit from it, and it might be beneficial to you. And I will never say don’t try therapy because you know what? Therapy might be wonderful for you.
But please, I would say go in with your eyes open. Go in with a bit of skepticism. It’s not a bad thing. Don’t throw your heart on the table before someone has earned your respect. And I think therapists need to have their respect earned.
But therapy can be very helpful. So yes, it can be helpful. But do you need therapy? No.
Also, even if you do go to therapy, I wholeheartedly recommend that you try doing self-therapy in some way. Try doing whatever it is that I call self-therapy. Try journaling. Try self-reflecting. Try thinking about your feelings. Try taking care of your physical body better. Try doing gentle exercise. Try spending more time with friends. Try having more fun. Try doing things that give you purpose and meaning. Try being helpful to other people. Try working out in the world. Try reading good, healthy literature.
All sorts of different ways to take care of yourself, to love yourself. Try eating healthier. Try getting away from alcohol and drugs. Alcohol and drugs being these outside things that might make you feel better but still, at some level, send you a message that you need something outside of you that will heal you.
Because to me, ultimately, this healing journey, it’s an inside journey. It’s an inside job, and it’s an inside path. So even if you do find value in therapy, I do believe that therapy is ultimately just an adjunct to your internal process. And if you want to call your internal process self-therapy, then what I would say is outside psychotherapy with a psychotherapist is just an adjunct to ultimately the bigger process of self-therapy.
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