What Can a Therapist Do For Me?

Chances are, if you've been abused, you've been advised to get therapy. A lot of well-meaning people have said that, but something is holding you back. Let's look into the whole concept of therapy in a Question and Answer format.

Q.: What does "getting therapy" mean?

A.: If your body was causing you as much pain as your emotions are now, you'd rush to an emergency room. But for some reason, society expects us to handle our emotions ourselves. That is unreasonable. You need to treat your emotions with as much respect as your physical body. People advising you to "get some therapy" are telling you to find a professional who can help heal your emotional wounds.

Q.: What can anybody do to help me "heal my emotional wounds"?

A.: The analogy between emotional and physical healing only goes so far, but it's still helpful. The fact is, the amount of emotional pain you are feeling is the equivalent of arterial bleeding. If you are in this much pain, you need a professional's help.

Q.: What could a therapist say? What could they do? Could they make it not have happened? Will they make me forget the abuse I suffered?

A.: No. They will help you learn to live with it. To continue the physical analogy, a proper therapist will clean the poison out of your wound so it can heal cleanly.

Q.: How??

A.: It's different for every patient, so I don't have a simple answer. A different analogy might help describe the process. Imagine if you need to...

Q.: It sounds like you're dodging the question. How can it help if you can't give me a straight answer?

A.: Hold on. When you have an infection and a doctor gives you an antibiotic, do you insist that she describe exactly how it kills infection? Of course not. You take the pills and trust. You're not being fair to yourself if you hold therapy to an impossible standard.

Q.: Okay. But can't you give me some idea of what it's like?

A.: In therapy, you do a lot of talking about things that bother you.

Q.: Talking? That doesn't sound very impressive.

A.: That's how you treat emotions and learn behaviors. That's how you learned to read, how to do math, how to do almost everything. The therapist listens to your pain. She trains you how to find new answers to old problems. Over time, your brain learns new ways to think and new paths to travel. Because it's a process, a learning process that you have to travel through, you must experience it to understand it. When you are in emotional distress you also get 'stuck' in destructive thought patterns that loop around and around. Talking about your pain with someone you trust helps break that loop so you can move forward.

Q.: Well, all of this is pointless, because I can't afford therapy anyway.

A.: Actually, you have a lot of available resources.

Go to the next page to learn how to find help.