Is Therapy Right for Me?

Is Therapy Right for Me? A Guide to Help You Determine if You Could Benefit from Seeing a Therapist

Deciding whether to seek therapy can be a significant step in your personal journey. Here are 8 important things to consider when determining if therapy is right for you:

1. Do you feel bad a lot of the time?

We tend to think of the world we live in as the one outside of us: our home, our workplace, the stores and restaurants we visit, parks, and places we travel to, the people in our lives. But where we truly live—the place we spend the most time—is our inner world. Inside of our own heads. If your inner experience is uncomfortable and features persistent sadness, frustration, anxiety, tension, or a chronic sense of emptiness or loss, then therapy is a recommended treatment option. Therapy is uniquely designed to help you explore your inner world in a way that feels safe and manageable. Importantly, positive shifts in our inner world create positive shifts in our outer world too.

2. Are you going through with something big?

If you are facing a major life challenge or transition such as a job loss, or loss of a loved one, entering or leaving the workforce, separation or divorce, therapy can support you in navigating the practical aspects of the situation at hand as well as the emotional ones. Developing coping strategies and processing feelings are key ways in which therapy helps at a time of transition.

3. Do you have the sense that your issues are tied to your past?

You may already be aware that some of your past experiences impact your present-day life in negative ways. If this is the case, therapy is a particularly good treatment option because most talk therapies include an exploration of personal history in order to determine how it shapes your present—including symptoms of anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress, substance use, relationship dynamics, attitudes about money, career satisfaction, etc. Guidance is provided on how to change your relationship with troubling parts of your past so that they no longer hold you back or cause you distress in the here and now.

4. Do you have recurring patterns that get in your way?

Change often requires that we first understand why certain patterns are occurring in the first place. Such insight allows us to directly address whatever is really getting in the way of new habits, more fulfilling relationships, greater career satisfaction etc. The underlying reasons for our patterns of behaviour are not always the obvious ones! If you have tried to change aspects of your life unsuccessfully, the kind of deeper exploration that therapy provides may be the missing piece of the puzzle.

5. Would you like to understand yourself better?

It has been said that the unexamined life is not worth living1. While we believe that every life has value, an examined life is often richer and has the potential to be more fulfilling than one that is not. Humans are meaning-makers. And we are inherently complex. The kind of self-exploration you do with a skilled therapist will help you to see connections that have been present but not evident. Therapy offers a structure within which you can consider yourself and your experiences more deeply.

6. Are you lacking satisfaction and purpose?

A sense of purpose is widely considered to be a contributor to overall wellbeing. If you generally feel aimless or lost, if you struggle to set or meet goals, or find that most of the ways in which you spend your time don’t provide a sense of satisfaction, therapy can help you to reconnect with a sense of purpose. With all of the have-tos and shoulds we encounter in life it is not hard to lose touch with ourselves and our unique gifts. Because therapy is a structured exploration into the particulars of you, it can help in ways that other treatment modalities cannot.

7. Are you hard on yourself?

If you are plagued by social anxiety, imposter syndrome or a voice in your head that jumps in to criticize you at every turn, you are not alone. What we think and feel about ourselves affects our lives in countless ways—either positively or negatively. If your self-esteem regularly takes a beating or you struggle to feel “good enough”, working with a therapist can be extremely helpful. Therapists understand how to identify sources of low self-worth and shame in our past and present and therapy can be very effective at resolving them over time.

8. Do you feel ready?

Therapy does require some commitment and openness to change, but is an investment in oneself that is unlike any other. You may have an inkling that at least some of what you are experiencing cannot be explained by mixed up brain chemicals. Your gut may be telling you that a human-to-human interaction is going to get you farther than online content. Perhaps you have tried other treatment options and they have not gotten you as far as you need to go to feel a change. Whatever your starting point, if you are curious and open to knowing yourself more deeply, working with a qualified therapist in regular sessions can take you farther than you ever imagined.

1“The unexamined life is not worth living” has been attributed to Socrates.

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