If you’ve never been to therapy before, you might be imagining it looking the way it does in tv shows and movies: the client lying on a couch, the therapist pausing from scribbling down notes to occasionally ask, “how does that make you feel?”
You may also think that therapy is only for people with serious traumas or mental illnesses. These stereotypes rarely reflect how therapy is these days. And everyone can benefit from having an impartial, nonjudgmental person to share and work through things with. Therapy is more like what you see in the image to the right. It’s working with a therapist as a team to figure out what it is you need in order to feel better. You come in with your mind a jumble of thoughts and feelings, sometimes so tangled that you can’t even tell what they are anymore. Your therapist will then support you in organizing thoughts and identifying feelings, making them easier to understand and improve or accept.