“Hey, have you ever gone to therapy?” began a dinnertime conversation last week, prompted by the youngest household member talking to her father. “Um, yes,” came the startled reply to the abrupt question, to which she asked, “Did it fix you?” Although there was some intended humor on the part of the 17-year-old, the question was a curious one, I thought, and almost certainly one that a lot of people contemplating counseling hope to answer in the affirmative afterwards.
I wonder why it is that we see our mental health as something either “broken” or “fixed,” when so few other parts of our lives are perceived as rigidly. My metabolism as a five-year-old sure operated differently than my fifty-year-old one; as a result, I have had to eliminate Pop Tarts and chocolate milk from my diet almost entirely even though they were my morning fuel for years. Likewise, some of the beliefs and responses that served me at one time no longer do and this requires a ruthless self-examination on the regular to determine if the reactions that protected me during one part of my development are fair and healthy to keep around now. If not, I need to figure out how to re-condition myself for more appropriate thoughts.
But even though I recognize my need to recalibrate my perceptions considering new circumstances, I don’t particularly know how to do this on my own. It just makes good sense to me to find an expert who can help. This doesn’t mean that I’m “broken,” or that at the end of my time with a counselor that I will be forever “fixed.” In my mind it’s more of an ongoing process not unlike the one my truck has with the mechanic. My eleven-year-old truck is solid, reliable, and just downright awesome. That said, the bumps and unavoidable potholes I hit during daily driving can eventually knock it out of alignment. I can tell from driving my truck when the alignment is off and I know if I don’t tend to it that it will result in more costly damage somewhere else, like with my tires, but I wouldn’t even begin to try repairing this issue on my own; thank goodness for a trusted expert who can sort out what I cannot!
Why is it so difficult for us to be as cognizant of our own “alignment” and acknowledge that it occasionally needs some attention? We are intelligent beings with an instinct to survive. We learn even before we are self-aware what kinds of behaviors elicit the desired responses from our caregivers: a bottle, a diaper change, a cuddle. We also learn as our brains develop and we become tuned in to our surroundings that crying is less effective than using words to communicate what we need, and that our own legs offer more immediate transportation than waiting on someone to tote us from point A to point B. It can get a little tricky, though, when conduct that helped us get what we needed at one time becomes detrimental later: underage drinking to evoke a response (and attention) from a distracted parent, fleeing conflict to avoid anger or violence are just a few. We would never think that just because we didn’t eat solid food in the early months of our lives that we should remain perpetually on a liquid diet now that we have teeth, but when it comes to those implicit and self-preserving habits that helped us survive at one point, it often never crosses our minds to modify or abandon them now that we’re in a different stage with new people, opportunities, and abilities. At times like these, careful and skillful guidance from an expert with more of a God’s-eye view of our life than we can have feels like the wisest option.
I adopted two dogs years ago and shared nearly ten years with them. These dogs were the center of my world and suffered no shortage of love, exercise, or health care. When they came to me, though, as three-year-olds, they would grab big mouthfuls of food at mealtime and run to another room to eat those bites. It made for a lengthy feeding process in the beginning because they had learned as puppies that food was scarce and could be snatched away unless they guarded it and fled to safety to eat what they could. It surely wasn’t a relaxing experience for them, and it took months to build trust and teach them that their food was protected and could be slowly enjoyed without their needing to cast nervous glances around the room. Mannerisms that ensured their ability to eat at one time thankfully were completely unnecessary in their new home, but without patience and the introduction of new ways to replace the old they would have been stuck in that pattern.
None of us are problems that need to be fixed, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t benefit from a mental tune-up now and again to help us interact with our world, our families, and our partners more meaningfully and healthily. The Hindu god Shiva’s role in the triumvirate was to destroy the universe in order to recreate it, and according to Shiva life is about fixing holes. There is something comforting in the thought that casting aside, rebuilding, and repairing are universal experiences from which we don’t need to run, and of which we should never be ashamed.
PartWolf 