What’s in it for me? Learn how therapy works from the perspective of both a therapist and a patient.
If you knew someone who was suffering from a serious personal crisis or mental illness, such as divorce or depression, what advice would you give them? Perhaps you might say the words that form the title of the book that these blinks are based on: “Maybe you should talk to someone.” And that “someone,” in this case, would be a therapist.
But what if the person with the problem happened to be a therapist themselves? That’s precisely the situation the author found herself in when she started suffering a crisis of her own. Like many therapists, she ended up seeing another mental health professional.
A therapist sitting on another therapist’s couch – that might sound like the setup to a bad joke, but in the author’s case, it laid the groundwork for some tremendous insights. That’s because it allowed her to gain firsthand knowledge of how therapy works from the perspective of the patient. She was then able to gain a deeper understanding of her experiences by relating them to those of her patients – four of them in particular, who we’ll learn about in these blinks. While the details of these stories have been modified to protect the patients’ anonymity, the underlying truths and lessons remain.
In these blinks, you’ll learn about
• the ways in which people blind themselves to the truth about their problems; • the deepest fears that often underlie those problems; and
• the key factors to confronting and overcoming those fears.
