NOTE: THIS WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN BINAH'S BI-WEEKLYN THERAPY COLUMN A SNEAK PEEK INSIDE

Maybe you will recognize yourself in this article.

Maybe you will recognize someone else you know; a child, a spouse, a parent, or a student.

And then maybe, once you recognize that person, stuff about therapy will make more sense to you. The stigma of therapy will seem silly to you. You might turn to your newly wed wife and ask curiously, “Have you ever gone to therapy?” And if she will say yes, you will be jealous. Therapy will seem like a treat you also want to experience.

Who lands up in therapy?

Twenty-five years ago, in our community, the answer would have been: crazy people. Really messed up individuals and families.

“So, really Mindy,” you want to know, “who lands up in therapy?”

The answer is very different today, and most people know the right answer.

It’s your neighbor. Your son. Your daughter’s high school teacher. Your spouse. The guy that fixes your plumbing and charges you a fortune. It’s that woman you always meet in the café who is dressed to the nines, and the guy your husband learns with every night. A principal, a business man, the electrician, the macher; a struggling mother, a bullied daughter, the anxious father, the grieving spouse.

You.

You are the kind of person who lands up in therapy.

A normal person who has friends and a job; knows how to laugh and organize; is a perfectly ordinary human being who has her regular Tehillim group or shiur, who is involved in chessed activities, who is the gabbai in shul or the menahel of a prestigious yeshiva. That’s who.

What are you doing in therapy?

Lounging around on my couch and drinking coffee.

No, I’m just kidding. But if you laughed then you either recognize yourself in that description or you simply have a good sense of humor. And that’s just part of your ordinariness, part of the ordinariness of most people who enter therapy.

People today enter therapy because they are struggling with some issue that is impacting their life is some way, and the same way they would take would use some sort of remedy for that annoying foot fungus, they choose to take care of their mind fungus as well.

Anxiety, fears, trauma, and grief. Bedwetting, social skills, dating issues, and relationships. Hair pulling, rebelliousness, numbness, and anger management. Every human condition that causes us upset is a reason to enter therapy to alleviate the symptoms and distress and improve daily living and our relationships.

While it’s true that our generation can little tolerate discomfort, and that becomes a negative judgment on us; I choose to see the positive aspect of our lack of tolerance as the primary motivator for therapy. I don’t want to tolerate the fighting with my wife, the yelling at my kids, snapping at my workmates; I don’t want to tolerate living with fears of flying, of leaving my house, of germs. So I will do something to take it away.

While a spouse in a previous generation would have learned to tolerate excessive stinginess in a marriage, abandon all hope for change, and learn manipulative or sly ways of hiding money from that controlling spouse; a spouse today would rather establish appropriate boundaries and behavior, improve the relationship, and create a home in which there are no secrets, lies, or anger.

Today’s parents don’t accept the inevitability of their sweet or quirky child being bullied in school, they don’t accept their socially inept child’s lack of friends as unavoidable, and expect—rightly so—that there must be ways to help their child acquire tools to live happier and more successful lives. Spouses don’t accept their partner’s phobias of germs, of flying in an airplane, as status quo and encourage them to get help so that they can visit their children in Eretz Yisroel together as a couple, so that their home can be an emotionally safe place.

If that low tolerance for discomfort breeds an attitude that accepts therapy, among other tools, as a means to improve one’s ability to overcome limitations, improve middos and relationships, then I would venture to say that living in our generation has its definite benefits.

I have clients who make that first call to me independently, some as young as fifteen; while others are sent by their parents ten years into their marriage. Principals mandate therapy for their students, and concerned neighbors or friends exert pressure on loved ones. Married children send their parent who has lost a spouse and has deteriorated in depression, and a rav sends parents with an unhappy child who is wrecking himself and others in his desperate unhappiness.

So sometimes, I have a client who has absolutely no idea—or say they say—as to why she needs therapy. And sometimes I have a client who knows she needs it but is unsure how therapy will help.

And most of my clients, once they sit down in my office, say, “I can’t believe I am doing this therapy thing. I feel so weird. Even nutty,” and I laugh and respond, “Join the club.”

There are pretty few people left today who haven’t had some contact with therapy.

So my clients, too, struggle with the stigma, even as they know they have no choice but to come. No choice because their spouse or school hanhala has made therapy mandatory, or because their situation seems so desperate that right now living with their problem seems much, much more terrible than living with the stigma of being in therapy.

It does not take that long for my clients to acknowledge how the the decision to enter therapy made logical sense. So the ones that have been forced to come see me, are secretly relieved—never admitting, of course—that someone cared enough to force therapy upon them; and the ones whose own feelings of desperation or discontent forced them through my door, experience overwhelming relief that they had the courage to finally do it. And I am sure there are hundreds, no thousands, of clients seeing other therapists who feel similarly.

What would make seem much nuttier to me is sitting in a dark room within inches of a light switch, because you wonder what the blind bats—who have an aversion to light—would think of you. Because bats are not really blind, you know. They just see differently. They navigate through their sense of sound. Therapy may sound like a stigma, but I prefer to see with my eyes. Then the view of therapy is a lot clearer.

LINKEDIN PROFILE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mindy-blumenfeld-a8067583 

My book, Therapy, Shmerapy, can be found in bookstores or online