Many people tell me they worry about starting therapy – taking the very possibility as a sign that they are abnormal, screwed up, or beyond hope. The thought of therapy can bring with it feelings of dread, embarrassment, or shame. In fact, I’ve had many clients tell me they carried around my number for months before reaching out. Social stigma is getting better, yet still exists and does not help with this. All to say, hesitation is normal – not fortunate, but normal.

The way I see it, my clients are not broken or weird, or in need of being ‘fixed,” rather, they are normal human beings, living a normal human life, who got ‘stuck.” What I mean by “stuck” is that when we humans experience stuff on the inside, like thoughts and feelings, that we don’t like, we do all sorts of things to make it go away. This makes sense, because we approach things in the world outside our mind and body the same way: we are hot, we “fix it,” we buy an air conditioner, remove some layers of clothes, or eat ice cream (a personal favorite). When we apply the same ‘fix it’ strategy to thoughts and feelings, however, the impact is usually quite short lived. For example, we feel anxious, we watch Netflix, and while we do this, we may notice our anxiety a bit less. Once the show ends, anxiety however, is likely to return, if it actually went away at all. The things we do to avoid thoughts and feelings can soon become repetitive patterns of behavior – we are stuck. At other times, we might get ‘stuck’ in our heads, looped into thoughts about the past, perhaps wishing we could re-write our lives somehow, or ruminating about the future, and feeling awful and again, “stuck.”

I wanted to create this short video series to demystify therapy – covering subjects such as when to seek therapy, the ‘snowball effect,” what happens in the first few sessions, and describe some of the common ‘modalities’ or types, of therapy.