By Laura Clay
The other day I was out for coffee with a friend who mentioned that she was watching the TV show Mad Men. If you are not familiar with the show, it is set in the 1960s and portrays fictional advertising executives from New York.
I replied that I had never watched the show, and she described a scene where one of the main characters, a housewife married to the main character, sees a psychiatrist after experiencing what we might now call a panic attack. She described an episode in which a female character lies on the traditional psychiatrist’s sofa, smoking and talking about her day-to-day life and why her hands keep going numb, while her doctor sits behind her, out of sight, with no expression on his face, and silently scribbles notes.
“He didn’t say a WORD the entire time,” my friend said, horrified, “And THEN they show you that after every appointment, he gives a rundown to her husband on all of the private things she shared in her session! I can see why all they did was drink and smoke on that show if that’s the type of therapy they got!”
We’ve Come a Long Way
I suppose there might be some offices with the traditional psychiatrist’s sofa and staunch, emotionless doctor scribbling notes. Thankfully, though HIPPA laws should prevent the breaching of the client’s trust even to her own husband. I cringe in pain thinking of how I can’t believe that something like that used to be ok! But I have to wonder how many people out there still picture this sort of scene when wondering if therapy or counseling could be of help to them.
In the 1950s and 60s, the societal view was that if you sought out help for emotional wellness, you were crazy or sick. It did not help matters that during that time, it was likely that pursuing help for emotional issues would land you not just in a sterile doctor’s office but in a psychiatric asylum. In fact, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy famously called for patients seeking help with mental health concerns to be treated in the community rather than in hospitals. He also signed into law the Community Mental Health Act of 1963.
Since then there has been a dramatic change in the mindset of how to help patients. I am not going to take you on a history of psychology for the last six decades {that would be a big snooze fest}, but the gist of it is that have seen an incredible increase in the types of services and therapies being offered by practitioners around the world. According to Ronald W. Dworkin in an article called Psychotherapy and the Pursuit of Happiness, “Gone are the days when therapists were dedicated to the doctrines of Freud and Jung, when the field was suffused with an air of priestly sanctity, heavy with the odors of tradition and authority.”
Authority Never Wins
Decades ago, doctors relied on their authority to get clients to open up and talk to them. Today we know that we can help you much more by earning your trust. In fact, I fear that there are some people who are still reluctant to try counseling because they believe that there is going to be a power struggle, or that all therapists are judgmental authority figures and going to tell them that they are right or wrong or exactly what to do to “fix” their problems. The term “shrink” still floats around in modern society, a shortening of “head shrinker” from the asylum days. And if the term is still around, the fear of being manipulated and changed against your will is still associated with it.
But today we know that we can help you much more by earning your trust. While my education and training are what enable me to help my clients, it is not what makes them feel comfortable opening up and sharing very personal and often painful thoughts and feelings.
I’m Just Like You
The fact that I am just like you is what makes our time together so powerful. It is why we can establish a therapist-client relationship that is built on trust. I’m just a normal person who has good days and even f’n craptastic days. I get in bad moods. I swear. I cry. I get angry and sad sometimes.
The only difference – an important difference – is that I have gone through school and training to be equipped with a pretty nice array of tools that I can use to help you work through your problem areas. I don’t use those tools to tell you what to do. I use those tools to help you figure out what to do. It’s my magic trick, superpower and passion all rolled into one – but don’t worry, I fight on the good side.
Can’t I Get the Same Benefits Talking to Friends?
Therapy can sometimes feel like talking to a friend. In fact, we want you to feel as comfortable talking to us as you do with your best friends. However, no matter how much your friends love you and want to help, a session with them can be as frustrating as talking to the emotionless doctor from Mad Men only instead of being emotionless and without advice, they can be too full of emotion and bias. Their advice comes from their own life experiences and mindsets, which may or may not be healthy or helpful. That doesn’t mean they are not essential to your world. It just means that they might not be the best option when working through something in your life or simply looking for tips on how to get through life a little easier.
Working Toward Goals
Perhaps one of the biggest differences between the stereotypical experience with a “shrink” and what we do at Forward Emotion, is that we will identify goals together instead of working toward a generic outcome. I can’t think of anything worse than not having a plan or a desired outcome to all of our work together. This is not something where we talk aimlessly week after week and declare you are “fixed” all of a sudden. You aren’t broken in the first place, so there’s no fixing to be done.
Instead, we will work on determining what you want to achieve through therapy and which of our services will help you best achieve it. Maybe that goal will change as we go on; that’s the nice thing about goals, we can adjust as necessary. Within that goal, there might be short term and long-term goals. We might use a mix of different types of therapy. There is no cookie-cutter approach, it is all customized with one goal: helping you. My job is not to tell you what to do or what to feel, it is to guide you to get there on your own. I still will type some notes as we talk – it’s easier on my hands than writing by hand – but I promise to show some emotion and to be a real person.
