04/06/2024
This isn't an anti-therapy post; therapy can be great and it's been super helpful to me and so many others.
But I have been noticing for awhile that many people think of therapy as the only route to navigating emotional difficulty & rewiring old patterns. And while it can be so helpful, therapy is also most often an expensive, 1:1 experience that takes us out of the context of the thing we're navigating. It's also often reactionary as opposed to proactive; we come to therapy when there are issues.
Again, in a wider context, that's not a bad thing for many reasons. But I believe that therapy should be viewed as a helpful resource more than the *entire answer* to anything emotionally challenging or mental health related.
When we zoom out, this segmented approach makes sense; our society has become more & more individualistic. Many people don't feel they have supportive community or feel like they have people they can go to for help or support. People (myself included) feel bad asking for 'favors,' without immediately offering something in return. (I personally know several people who have recently struggled networking when looking for new jobs because they feel like they're "taking" from community without offering anything in return. Oy!)
But the most important moments in my healing and growth journey have actually come from taking part in healthy communities. From being allowed to be messy, from engaging safely in conflict and being willing to share and listen, from showing up consistently, and from learning from our experiences and getting better at communicating as we go. It's been imperfect and has made imperfection seem a lot less scary.
I believe that this experience is possible for everyone, but that as a culture we have to be willing to see the value in increasing our collective emotional intelligence. We have to be willing to shift from of our cultural norms away from stark individualism and see that we ALL benefit when we can look out for and hold space for one another.