Top 10 Myths about Therapy: Part I 🛋

Hey guys, I'm Natalie Moore, a therapist in Pasadena, and this is part 1 of a 2-part series of the top 10 myths about therapy. So today I'm going to talk about the first 5. You ready? Myth number 1: If I go to therapy, then I'm admitting that there's something seriously wrong with me. Some people who reach out for therapy are in serious crisis and need a lot of help and a lot of support. However, there's also a lot of people who seek therapy for self-growth reasons. Maybe they want to get to know themselves better. Maybe they want to improve their self-confidence. Maybe they want to increase their leadership skills at work. Maybe there's some fine-tuning that they need to do in their relationships. Or, for example, therapists, we go to our own therapy because we obviously have to continue growing personally and professionally in order to do the work that we do. So when people tell me, "Oh man, why would I go to therapy? That's for people who need serious, serious help," I tell them, "Look, I go to therapy too. There's nothing wrong with it. I promise you. It's actually pretty awesome." Myth number 2: Therapists psychoanalyze their clients the way Freud did. Okay, I can see where this myth comes from, especially if you've watched a lot of Woody Allen films where he's reclining in a sofa and the therapist is quietly analyzing him in the background. But modern therapy is very different. It's a collaborative process between the therapist and the client. Myth number 3: If I start therapy, I'll have to go weekly for the rest of my life. Look, there's some people who love going to therapy. I personally do. But most people, they just want to go to therapy to deal with their problems. The vast majority of clients that I see have a certain amount of issues that are pressing that they really need help with. Maybe it's anxiety. Maybe it's a relationship. Maybe work is not going so great. But once they get through some of their issues in therapy, they're ready to be done with it. Myth number 4: If I talk about my problems and my feelings, they're only gonna get worse. Yes, talking about our problems and talking about our feelings can be really uncomfortable, but let's face it, avoiding them completely is it's not working either. In therapy, we specifically talk about feelings and problems to move through them. The term that I like to use, very corny, but bear with me, is when you feel it, you heal it. And it's so true. When we're able to feel the hurts and actually feel them deeply, we're able to let them go. And when we're able to talk about our problems to a nonjudgmental person, with a different perspective, we're able to see creative solutions to these problems. Myth number 5: I had a bad experience with a therapist. They must all be like that. First of all, I'm so sorry that you had a bad experience with a therapist. We're supposed to be healers. We're not supposed to be the ones hurting you. We're supposed to help you get through past hurts. As professional therapists, our job is is to notice when we've unintentionally hurt a client and call ourselves out on it so that we can repair the rupture. I'm so sorry about what happened to you, but it doesn't mean that every therapist is going to be that way. So that concludes the first 5 of the top 10 myths about therapy. Stay tuned for the next video. See ya!