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I have Meanon and Dr. Icehouse. LOL!
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My friends are my unofficial therapists too. I'd be lost without them.
I've done some informal therapy, Duke. I'm not fully trained. I'm looking for a placement to start in September. I'm seeing a counsellor at the moment with my husband. It's not the sort you'd receive but it's interesting being on the other side, so to speak. I'm getting what I wanted out of it but even the counsellor has described it as rough.
Therapy is useful if you have had bad experiences that you are having difficulty overcoming or if you have a specific problem. Apart from that, many find it useful in helping them deal with general discontent, to explore their hopes for themselves and how to realise them. Friends of the right type (objective, empathic, supportive, challenging) can do the job just as well but not everyone has friends like that and some people find it easier to talk to a stranger about the very personal.
The most important thing is finding someone you click with, who you can relate to. Shop around. There are different schools of therapy, all based on different principles. All have better success rates than doing nothing but so do a lot of other activities. It doesn't always work. CBT has a higher success rate than most.
I was reading about therapy today. The types of problems people present with very much depend on the times they live in. In Freud's day it was about sexual inhibition. In the 50s about identity. Now most people who see a therapist feel a kind of despair about the pointlessness of their lives, or about the impossibility about sexual relationships. Or, they feel a generalised phobia, an anxiety about ordinary things.
This is very much linked to the pressures of modern day living. Pointless complexity, competitive market driven cultures, superficial unsatisfying models of a better life. People discover that what they think they want does not in fact make them happy. They get dissatified with themselves and their inability to be contented. Therapy gives time and space to explore what makes us happy, what is possible and what is practical.