Am I Fully Healed Yet?
Many people, myself included, initially come to therapy with what is called a “medical model” of what therapy is all about. The basic premise is something like this:
If you are suffering from your thoughts, feelings, or behaviors then you have a medical condition and you need to see a doctor who will fix that medical condition and then you will be fully healthy again.
Seems simple enough, and it aligns with our vision for how physiological health works too. There are strengths to this view of psychotherapy and ways that it can be a useful way to think about the therapeutic process, however, there are also some serious shortcomings and unintended negative consequences.
Why Should I Do Therapy?
A client recently told me that she had a couple skeptical people question her as to why therapy was valuable and why anyone should do it, and she asked what my answer to this question would be. This question surprisingly stopped me in my tracks a little bit, but after a few minutes of deliberating I was able to come up with a relatively simple 2-part answer that we both seemed relatively happy with.
Understanding OCD
Over the past few years with the increasing popularization of mental health therapy, many therapy terms have entered common language. This has had a positive effect in many ways with the increasing normalization of self-care and healthy boundaries. However, there has also been increasing confusion, such as in the dilution of the meaning of serious mental health conditions, over self-diagnosis of these conditions, and resulting confusion in what these conditions actually are and the extent to which people suffer from them (consider the many articles that start with “I cured my depression by…”, which make major depressive disorder sound a lot less serious and easier to recover from than it actually is).
Questions about Self-Care
Something that I’ve come across again and again in my personal life and clinical practice is people (myself included) bumping up against the fact that we have a harder time offering ourselves support when we’re struggling than we do offering it to others. In fact, this comes up so commonly that it’s led me to be suspicious about the whole thing. Is there something not quite right about our expectations for self-care?