Ben Ballance

Being a British, therapy always seemed like it was something extra – a self-indulgence for people with either money or problems or both.

The last few years of pre-apocalyptic experience have slowly hacked away at my stance and, at the beginning of this year, I decided therapy was something I wanted to try in 2023. Pairing this with a consistent, low-level anxiety I started to feel around the beginning of the year (relatedly, I just noticed I haven’t posted on this blog since the beginning of the year),

Here are a few reflections I’ve had so far:

It will probably take some time to get comfortable with therapy

Some common thoughts I have:

• Is this self-indulgent? I’ve just been talking about myself for the past 45 minutes.
• Ugh, I have therapy in 10 minutes – is it too late to cancel?
• Am I boring my therapist? Are these legitimate things to be talking in therapy about?

These thoughts are OK.

Sometimes you don’t have much to say

This is also OK.

Good therapists find ways of gently probing to find if there actually is something you want to talk about. Sometimes, my most helpful sessions are ones where I go into it thinking I have nothing to talk about. Then, after some gentle prodding, it seems to come out of me, “well, actually, I have been thinking about this one thing…”.

I’ve also spoken to people recently who say they like to journal before their therapy appointments. I like this idea and will probably give it a try. If we accept the idea that writing is thinking (or speaking, this makes sense. By doing this, we are preformulating the thoughts and gaining clarity on them in order to use the therapy session to dive into them further.

All that to say, it’s OK not to have much to say in a given session, but you’ll probably get more out of therapy if you figure out something to say.

There are different types of therapy and it’s probably worth doing some research

It makes sense now, but going into therapy, I didn’t know much about the different approaches therapists are trained under and use with their patients. My (still limited) understanding is that most therapists fall under two practices: psychoanalysis (Freud-vibes) or Cognitive Behaviorial Therapy. If I was starting therapy over gain, I would probably read more about these and even meet with different therapists who specialize in these approaches to see what they were all about.

Outside of this, there’s basically a whole al a carte menu of therapy options.

For example, my therapist specializes in something called Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy which involves visualizing a traumatic event or situation and attempting to reframe it so that it’s less traumatic. I knew nothing about EMDR before and it felt a little awkward initially. You basically close your eyes and rhythmically tap on your own legs while thinking about the traumatic experience you are looking to reframe. Despite the mild awkwardness, I feel like I’ve been having success with it – at least in terms of “I feel less anxious about this thing”-issues iand less “What am I doing with my life”-issues.