Wynne,
Sorry for not responding sooner, I just gonzo missed that this thread even existed.
It's not an arrogant question at all, I think it's a question that anyone who has ever gone to therapy has wrestled with. You invest a lot of time, energy, money, and effort into therapy. You SHOULD see value in anything that you plan to put that much into.
And I loved the Wynne Emergency broadcast system.
So, what's the point of therapy? I find this question especially timely because the last few weeks have been a major breakthrough for me (more on that in another thread sometime
) and right now I am feeling like everything I've been through, the tears, the agony, the hard work, and wading through the cesspool of my past is all worth it to be where I now am.
First, I want to agree with Hummingbird about people in the past. They're were a lot of things besides therapy they did without: antibiotics, hygiene, nutrition, vaccines, dental care, machinery, industry etc etc. And that's why in the middle ages if you lived to the age of 40 you were considered elderly. Therapy is like so much else of modern medicine. As we continue to learn more about how the human being functions the better care we can take care of ourselves. And we are also, especially in Western culture, living in an unprecedented time of prosperity and peace. We have the time and resources to worry about how we're feeling and improve how we relate and to apply our new knowledge to improve our quality of life.
My next point is one I share from my personal experience but don't believe that it necessarily applies in a universal sense. This is probably true for some but not for all. If you had met me when I started going to therapy, or even during a lot of the years I was doing therapy, I had what looked like a very successful life. I was well educated, employed as a professional making a good living, married with two children, a nice home and from all outward signs a life that looked pretty enviable. The problem was that there were problems at the core of how I lived. I often felt like my outward bahavior was a facade. That I was very good at behaving in a such a manner as to convince people that I was a wonderful person, but it didn't match my core experience, but I didn't let anyone in far enough to figure that out. So I often felt alone and isolated. Which became even more confusing because I wondered what my problem was that I had so much but felt so miserable. I really thought I was just an ungrateful wretch for a long time. Therapy for me has been a long journey to being authentic. Of learning to be honest about what's on the inside and deal with those feelings so that I'm not just presenting the person I think people should see but who I really am.
I also know for me therapy was about breaking the chain of abuse. When my kids were 4 and 2 I started to have what I considered serious anger problems towards my kids. My worst nightmare was becoming true, I was going to start hitting my kids and become my father. I fled into therapy determined to do anything I could to not become him. Funny thing is, I thought it was inevitable but two therapists have proved me wrong. So I have done better than my parents did (I had a lot more to work with than they did) and my children will do better than I did. Therapy has been another way of making sure that the next generations do better than the ones before them. And that I did not have to live with becoming something I would hate.
I was, almost without being conscious of it, seriously cut off from my emotions because I had no skills or resources for dealing with them. But the problem is emotions don't go away when we ignore them so a lot of our time and energy (unconsciously) becomes bound up in avoiding them. This tends to lock us into very rigid behavior patterns because above all we must avoid actions that might cause the emotions we're trying to avoid. Which means trying new things or have a range of reactions to choose from gets shut down, and our options become limited. I lived in a small dark cell instead of being in the open air with space and light and choices. Our emotions also serve as a rich guide which provides information about how we are living, what we are passionate about, even what we enjoy and being cut off from them deprives us of what we need to live a fuller, freer life. (I really don't feel like I'm expressing this well, probably because I am still learning it.)
Therapy is a way to live a self-examined life. To not settle for just "getting by." To live our life in such a way that we can reach the full potential of our strengths and gifts.
The most powerful argument I know for therapy is the people who engage in it. They are willing to squarely face who they are, and how they do things and try to make it better. I find that deeply admirable.
And you mentioned about it being all your parents fault? But that's the whole point, it's not. Your patterns of behavior are set up, your unconscious tendencies are created in the crucible of your childhood, but you're an adult now and responsible for how you live and the choices you make. Your upbringing is not your destiny set in stone, you can change it. You can examine how you live and decide to change it in order to overcome your past and live in a more authentic way. But the only way to know ourselves, to see our unconscious operate in our behavior is in relationship. Human beings can not know themselves in isolation. So we go to therapy so that our parents are NOT the last word of how we live our lives.
Thank you for asking the question, I don't think I've thought about this in such a thorough way for a long time.
AG
