Thinking out loud.

Thank you to my wonderful guest writer for this lovely blog.

Everyone is getting therapy.  Everyone. Well, clearly not everyone, but a Sunday morning post therapy de-brief with a friend who had her session the evening before or my flatmate who had her session on Wednesday, is no longer an unusual feature of the week.

Therapy (and in particular hypnotherapy) is a pretty new development in my life, with a total of 5 sessions on tally at my time of typing. I’d thought about therapy for a while from my mid-20s (now 31) but the idea of brain spewing (as I like to call it) on a stranger was a pretty uncomfortable concept. Opening the treasure trove of mental junk accumulated through my teens and 20s just sounded like effort. And with that came the doubts and insecurities. What will I talk about? What will he/she think of me? Am I a nut job? Will it work? What do I even want to achieve?

Although I had a niggling idea of the kind of things that I thought were bothering me, I entered my first session nervous and unsure. Five sessions on, do I think therapy has been some miracle cure? No. I don’t think there was anything to “cure” in the first place. What I do know is that you don’t have to be crazy to see a therapist. You don’t need to be an emotional wreck struggling to function or suffer from addictions or OCD or any other reason we give ourselves to just not do it. In my last session I spoke about some personal ambitions I had and we explored how I might get there. That 1 hour a week with an unbiased, objective therapist, with no personal agenda has helped me re-focus on the issues at hand and start the process of becoming less burdened, re-energised and just not so damn hard on myself!

We’re only too happy to invest in the physical. A nice new outfit, some highlights in my hair, that brand new juicer and boot camp plan to keep in tip top shape. But what about the mind? What about the soul? It’s only natural that sometimes they might need tonic too.

So if you think you could benefit from chatting stuff through; whatever “stuff” looks like to you; what have you got to lose?

You’re not mental for seeing a therapist, you’re a pretty smart cookie.