Therapy's a lot like...

I recently decided to reorganize the storage room in our house. I’ve done this a few times before, but somehow, day after day, week after week, that room just accumulates more and more stuff. A Costco bulk order of paper towels has to go somewhere. And those bikes can’t stay out in the rain! Before I know it, I can’t even walk into the room. It takes skill to navigate the chaos and even still some things remain just out of reach.

So I decided it was time.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

As the chaos of our storage room spilled out into our living space and hallways, I was struck: this is a lot like therapy.

In therapy, we re-visit and try to bring a kind of order and clarity to the over-stuffed “rooms” of our lives. But in order to do this, there is some undoing that must come first. We have to pull things out, move shelving around, make countless decisions about what stays and what goes, and experiment along the way. It’s messy. It’s a process.

A few moments in the storage-room-reorg process struck me as particularly related to therapy. Allow me to extend to extend the analogy.

There was that initial shock. I pulled everything out. My tidy living room and hallways were now temporary holding spaces for clutter that had not seen the light of day in quiet a while. And already I was battling with some regret. It honestly looked okay before. Maybe I should just put it back.

I have to warn my clients: sometimes it will get worse before it gets better. This is not the best news to hear, but it’s part of ethical, informed consent. If you’re going muck around with the structure of how you’ve been getting on, expect it to be uncomfy, at the very least. Whatever brought you to the therapy room in the first place — that sense of motivation and drive — may wane and that’s okay. That’s normal.

Then I realized my project wasn’t going to be finished in one day. Quite literally, I needed to buy a few, new organizing bins and such, and, between the normal stuff of life, eating, sleeping, taking care of kids… I just was not going to get it done in a single day. So too with therapy. While I’ve heard some people have extremely helpful first sessions, the norm is for therapy to take some time. As they say, the storage room wasn’t re-organized in a day. (Thanks to the one person that laughed at that.)

After a few days of hugging the wall and tip-toeing to avoid knocking over random odds and ends, I wondered: will it ever get done? At the risk of sounding dramatic, I truly wondered if this was just my life now. Was I bound to live a perpetually messy existence for the rest of my life? In therapy, it can be easy to lose sight of the end, to be overwhelmed by what’s staring you down in the moment. Maybe I’m just stuck and there’s actually no way out. I get that feeling. Along the way, I’ve learned how the therapy room often becomes a battleground for hope and my job is to hold onto hope with my clients, or sometimes for my clients, when they themselves are too in things to see how change could be possible.

I also realized during my project that I needed some sort of buy-in from others. It’s their house too, after all. It was one thing to accept for myself that my project was a multi-day effort, but this affected them as well.

While it can be alluring to think of therapy as “me working on myself” or “me doing my own work,” going to therapy is a highly relational endeavor. Not only does therapy involve relating to a therapist, in therapy, we bring the constellation of our family and friends into session with us. What I mean is, as we reorganize and move stuff around, we are impacting not just ourselves, but we are changing our environment, our relationships with family and friends.

There were numerous occasions that I had to recruit my kids’ help. I needed to do the brunt of the work myself, but having them understand my goal was necessary. Otherwise, the chaos would have been a purposeless inconvenience and a point of constant complaint. At various points, my wife was incredibly helpful in asking what I needed or just by taking our kids out to give me the space I needed to focus and get it done.

Bringing others into the work we do as clients in therapy is key, so long as they are safe, trusted individuals. Without a growing network of supportive friends or family, we have little chance to explore what change could be taking place.

Perhaps my biggest realization of all was the need to bite things off one piece at a time. I think humorously of the psychologist from What About Bob? saying, “Baby steps” and realize how profoundly mundane my realization is. And that’s okay.

I can recall listing out ALL the things I wanted to talk about in session with my own counselor, to realize that I could only really delve into one (maybe two) things in my allotted fifty minutes. Deep in so many of us I think there’s this drive to just get it all out there and done with as quickly as possible, but the reality is that change happens one box at a time. One box.

I needed to take my time with each box. They held valuables. Some things were less so and could be donated or tossed, but I needed to see for myself. I need to make a personal determination and that takes time.

Therapy too takes times. It’s less about solving all of your problems and more about seeing your life with a greater clarity and showing up with a greater sense of agency. But first, you have to let the chaos spill out into your hallways and your living spaces.