The Value of Therapy
Therapy is defined as “a form of treatment that aims to improve mental, emotional, and behavioral well-being. It involves working with a trained professional, such as a therapist or counselor, to explore and address issues that may be causing distress or interfering with daily life”. The overall goal of therapy “is to help individuals gain insight into their issues, develop coping mechanisms, and improve their overall quality of life”.
People who aren’t familiar with therapy sometimes have negative thoughts about it and the people who utilize this resource. The mainstream narrative is that only “crazy” or “broken” people go to therapy. Society has normalized - even exalted - the belief that there is weakness in not being able to solve your problems, even traumatic ones, on your own. It’s as if there is some sort of invisible badge of honor in consistently struggling and overcoming it alone. Newsflash: There isn’t.
Abuse is rooted into our society. Things like making negative comments about a person’s appearance is considered a joke; anyone who doesn’t laugh is thought to be weak or sensitive. Unfortunately, this mentality carries over into break ups/divorces, physical injuries, being bullied, making mistakes in public and especially surviving sexual violence. Any of these events can be traumatic. And, we’re expected to suck it up and move on as if we’ve only dropped our ice cream cone instead of having been materially harmed. And, in the case of sexual violence, we’ve lived through having been stolen from ourselves.
None of us received a manual to use through out our life. Everything we learned in childhood came from the people around us. So, our ability to overcome any type of difficulty is based upon how our parents or primary caregivers taught us to do it. Their words or silence and action or inaction caused us to develop our own responses to difficult situations. The ability to regulate our emotions, process stress, problem solve, effectively communicate, and deescalate are all either directly or indirectly taught us. And, the truth is that none of us has been proactively taught to survive sexual assault.
This is where therapy comes in for us survivors. Therapy teaches participants how to survive the violence in a way that doesn’t require us to abandon ourselves. In fact, a good therapist teaches us how to tap into our authentic selves so that we can get on the right wellness path. Therapy is a resource that combines science, sociology, psychology, and criminal justice in a way that helps us understand the mental, emotional, and physical impacts of the violence and why we’ve each responded to it the ways that we did. We learn about trauma responses; the personas of sexual predators; exercises to successfully process the effects of the trauma; how to talk about our feelings in safe and productive ways; and, most importantly, we learn how to trust ourselves again.
None of us is “crazy" or “broken”. We are human beings who are surviving sexual violence. It’s completely okay to seek support in order to move beyond victim to survivor. Therapy can help us do just that. One size doesn’t fit all. So, it may take time to find a therapist that’s the best fit. But, when we each find the best therapist, that person can help improve quality of life.