Therapy isn’t what you think!
Therapy isn’t just for those with severe mental health disorders. Therapy is for anyone looking to improve their well-being and gain insight into their lives.
If you’re hesitant about therapy, here are 25 benefits of going to therapy.
1.Improve Cognitive Flexibility
The core of therapy is cognitive flexibility, the ability to adapt and shift your thinking, perceptions, attitudes, and responses to various situations. The less rigid you are, the more you can enjoy the spectrum of the human experience.
2. Address Painful Childhood Experiences
Many are unaware of how painful childhood experiences can affect our quality of life as an adult. Therapy provides a safe and non-judgmental space for you to process and heal from these painful childhood experiences.
3. Strengthen Emotion Regulation
Have you ever felt out of control with your emotions or that your emotions are controlling you? Therapy can teach you skills to help you regulate your emotions effectively.
4. Learn to Tolerate Distress
Sometimes, life throws us curveballs, and having the tools to tolerate distress equips you to handle challenges without resorting to unhealthy coping mechanisms.
5. Enhance Interpersonal Effectiveness
Humans are inherently social beings. We seek connection and a sense of belonging. Therapy can help you build stronger relationships and teach you useful social skills.
6. Increase Self-Awareness
Therapy is not just about reducing symptoms. Therapy can help you develop a better understanding of yourself, your values, your priorities, and your motivations.
7. Learn to Self-Soothe
The ability to self-soothe is an important skill to learn. Self-soothing provides you with healthy methods to calm yourself down and productively regulate your emotions.
8. Resolve Unresolved Trauma
Together with your therapist, you can address past traumas in a safe and supportive space. Exploring and processing painful memories in therapy may allow you to gain a new perspective, reduce the emotional intensity, understand the impact it had on you, and help you reclaim a sense of control over your life.
9. Reduce Stress
Feeling stressed from work? School? Family? Therapy can teach you ways to reduce stress and help you cope better.
10. Improve Sleep Quality
If you’re struggling with sleep, therapy can help identify the underlying cause of the sleep problem and improve your sleep hygiene so you can sleep better without medication.
11. Cope with Burnout
Do you have difficulty concentrating at work? Is there an absence of satisfaction when you complete a project? Do you find yourself on ‘high alert’ a lot of the time? These may be signs of burnout. Therapy can help you find healthy ways to manage this to prevent burnout from occurring in the future.
12. Cultivate Self-Compassion
Oftentimes, we are more compassionate towards others than to ourselves. Therapy can help you learn to be more kind to yourself – you deserve to be kind to yourself.
13. Set Achievable and Realistic Goals
Sometimes, our goals may seem impossible to reach. Therapy can help you break your goals down into smaller steps that are more feasible and realistic.
14. Learn Parenting Skills
Whether you are a new parent or a parent to three teenagers, therapy can teach you parenting strategies to deal with difficult situations and improve your relationship with your child.
15. Engage in Healthier Romantic Relationships
When we put in the time and effort to work on ourselves in therapy, we learn more about our values, boundaries, and effective ways to express ourselves. This can help us engage in more fulfilling romantic relationships.
16. Improve Self-Esteem
If you’re suffering from low self-esteem, you likely learned to doubt yourself and not trust in your abilities. The constant feeling of not being good enough becomes automatic. Therapy can help you build a stronger sense of self-worth and challenge these negative core beliefs about yourself.
17. Engage in the Present (with Mindfulness)
The key to living a fulfilling life is to live more in the present. Therapy can teach you mindfulness skills to help you create more moments where you are engaged in the present.
18. Experience Undivided Attention & Active Listening
How often do we get the undivided attention of someone who actively listens to us? A therapist provides focused attention and listens attentively to your concerns without judgment.
19. Learn Self-Acceptance
We are often our own worst critic. Therapy can help us achieve a level of acceptance for who we are and how the accumulation of our experiences shapes the person we are today.
20. Reduce Anxiety and Depression
If you are experiencing anxiety and/or depression, therapy is evidence-based to reduce these symptoms and provide strategies to help you cope in the future. A key goal of therapy is to teach you to become your own therapist.
21. Understand Your Thoughts and Behaviours
Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours are linked. If we change one, it can affect the others. Therapy can help you identify patterns in thinking and behaving and understand where they come from.
22. Address Unmet Attachment/Relational Needs
What are your attachment or relational needs? Which one is unmet? Therapy can help you explore these needs and find effective ways to meet them.
23. Experience Corrective Emotional/Relational Experience
Therapy offers the opportunity to express your emotions constructively and non-judgementally. The therapeutic relationship allows you to experience a safe, validating, and secure relationship.
24. Increase Personal Empowerment
By seeking therapy, you are taking charge of your mental and emotional health. Just like how we put in time in the gym to strengthen our physical health, we can put in time in therapy to strengthen our mental resiliency.
25. Build a Fulfilling Life
The ultimate goal of therapy is to help you build a fulfilling life – a life of colour and meaning – a life worth living.
Written & Reviewed by Ariel Ko, Clinical Psychologist in 2024
