“Get a grip…. aren’t you over it by now? ….Smile, things can’t be that bad… What is your problem?”
People navigating trauma often hear words like these from ‘well-meaning’ friends and family. The truth is, unless we’ve experienced some level of trauma ourselves, we may struggle to feel or express empathy.
It’s a valid question—and one that even I, a therapist, found myself asking recently. After a week of using ChatGPT to untangle a few personal and professional knots, I caught myself wondering: Why bother going to therapy anymore?
You meet every deadline.
You show up prepared.
You’re the one others turn to when things fall apart.
From the outside, you’re thriving. But inside, it’s another story entirely.
At the end of the day, you collapse into bed, not from physical exhaustion, but from the mental marathon you’ve been running since morning. Conversations loop in your head. You replay moments, dissect your words, question your tone. “Was I weird? Did I overshare? Did I say too much?”
This is the experience of high-functioning anxiety.
What to do when you don’t know where to begin
In my experience, people are so overwhelmed with life and its myriad demands they feel they’re just treading water. There’s nothing wrong with that. Treading water gives you time to breathe, but it’s not meant to be a long-term solution. We all know what happens when you tread water for too long ….
‘What will you do with your one wild and precious life?’
Taken from ‘The Summer Day’ by poet Mary Oliver, it’s a question I put to my coaching and therapy clients. It’s a question that’s relevant whether they have achieved all they set out to achieve in life or find themselves in a stagnant career and want to pivot.
At some point, we all wake up and wonder if we are living the life we want.
My first step with any client facing this dilemma is to unpack what it really means to them.
Lately I have been using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), often referred to as “tapping”.
It is a form of counseling intervention that incorporates elements from various therapies including cognitive therapy, exposure therapy, and acupressure.
Jon comes into my office, clearly frazzled.
“No one appreciates me. I do everything for everyone else and no one cares.”
There’s an angry tone to his voice.
There’s a certain type of client who comes to me with a very specific issue they wish to resolve.
Co-dependency.
The image these clients present to the world is a passive one, but that’s far from the truth. Their need to be less dependent is usually linked to just one person or one relationship but what surprises them is my response to their ‘problem’, which goes something like this:
“What I really want is for you to become dependent on way more people”.
This sounds at odds with our individualistic, egocentric culture but let’s take a walk back in time.
I follow a lot of business blogs and although I enjoy them, I see a nonstop necessity to go at full speed. In reality, in my work as a therapist and coach who mostly focuses on emotions, I realize that we are often limited by things that happen in our daily lives.
All due respect to Elton John, but I’ve found acceptance—not ‘sorry’—seems to be the hardest word.
We crave it on an almost cellular level—in fact, our very existence was once tied to acceptance from our tribe. Today, we seek it all the wrong places from the size of our paycheck to our number of “likes” on Facebook. We search for it from strangers and spouses alike. We try to fill our acceptance vacuum with everything from boxed wine and Netflix to spin class and Xanax.