Your first therapy session can be very uncomfortable and intimidating. If you’re still on the fence after reviewing the Where to Start articles, keep reading.
Unexpected skills you will develop in therapy sessions are more like life skills. You can use these life skills to start self healing at home. These value gains all describe emotional intelligence, but it is hard to determine the value of “emotional intelligence.” This article looks at seven value gains and how they apply more to daily life. As well as examples from therapy sessions so you can see how these gains are possible for you. Let these values encourage you to start your journey. And don’t forget to check out the bonus tip at the end of the article.
2) Clarifying and finding the origins of discomfort.
3) Gaining control over your emotions.
4) Articulating your emotions to others.
5) Identifying the emotional reactions of others.
6) Empowering you for Connection
If you haven’t read the Where to Start articles, check out the links immediately below.
- Six Tips to Make Starting Therapy Easy
- How to Get 110% Out of Therapy
- Finding a Good Fit, Behaviors to Avoid in a Therapist
Value Gain 1) How to talk about emotions.
If you are coming from an abusive or rough family situation, discussing emotions was likely something that never happened. As a result, you never had a chance to practice emotional conversations and do not have the vocabulary. In adult life, emotions can be a bit dynamic, and trauma events can be intense. This makes them harder to navigate and process without basic emotional vocabulary. Our emotional vocabulary series that will run on instagram for a while. Our Pinterest account will also be doing a series on emotional definitions and some of the roles that word use has in healing trauma. Brush up on your emotional vocabulary with our Pinterest emotions board.
Why is this new emotional vocabulary so valuable?
Value Gain 2) Clarifying and finding the origins of discomfort.
First, sitting with someone trained to listen to emotional conversations and who has the words to construct the conversation provided clarity by being able to name what was being felt. Once something could be identified, organizing the situation as an informal cause-and-effect setup was easier and enabled determining where the discomfort came from, which led to how to resolve it.
Value Gain 3) Gaining Control Over Your Emotions
The way that additional control was provided maybe unexpected at the start of therapy. Control might mean to you that I’ll resolve these specific issues and not have to deal with them again. But the value that you’ll actually get is how to articulate to people in my daily life. This communication is very empowering. It will provide you a way of navigating and handling the emotions. Being able to describe and identify emotions is not typically an advertised value. Being able to have emotional conversations will be one of the more valuable tools outside of therapy.
Value Gain 4) Articulating Your Emotions to Others
For example, conveying your discomfort to other people is beneficial when you are in your emotional mind. Someone with a better understanding of what you are experiencing has a better chance to help lighten the situation.
Value Gain 5) Identifying the Emotional Reactions of Others
Emotional vocabulary starts to build your emotional intelligence. If you are dealing with family trauma, vocabulary provides this extra insight that helps with not just spotting but identifying the emotional reactions of family members as they start to happen. This early identification of emotionally charged situations helps provide direction on how to respond and not get caught up in the situation.
Value Gain 6) Empowering You for Connection
The other immediate value of talk therapy is someone who can hear your story and justify your feelings. Having your feelings accepted is enormous. Therapists have heard a lot of tough topics and specifically signed up to listen to many challenging issues. They have the vocabulary and skills to pick up on the emotions and actively listen to what you are saying. Feeling heard and understood will be one of the first things that stabilize the situation, and therapy is one of the safest places to start telling your story.
Out of this environment, you are receiving the skills to be an active listener. Because you’ve also now got the vocabulary, you are set up to connect with people as they share stories with you. As a person who can emotionally understand someone, you begin to build trust. And an emotional connection is one of the more powerful human connections.
Value Gain 7) A Fresh Perspective
I also had therapists early on who could provide a perspective on your story is another value you might not expect and it will be a huge turning point. The mind can develop coping stories at a younger age and keep them for decades. When these coping stories don’t get challenged, we are living our lives out of an inaccurate coping story that might not be accurate. Talk therapy can provide you with clarity that you didn’t know you needed on those stories you’ve always told yourself to survive your situation.
Example of the Old Perspective
To help make this clearer, we’ll use an example. My mother was a large alcoholic and drug addict. This was violent and not good, but in the morning or afternoon, once she woke up or a day or so later, she would be “nice” and make a meal. But the story would repeat for nearly a decade. I would tell myself what I had heard about drinking. Which was, when people got drunk, they didn’t remember. This made total sense in my child’s mind, and I did not question it. This story I told myself said that she didn’t do this to me on purpose but that she didn’t remember. Because if she remembered she wouldn’t do this to me.
Where the New Perspective Came In
During a session in my twenties, I was sharing stories and said, “But she didn’t remember.” At this point, I had even been through college and to have experience seeing other people drink. The therapist asked one question that was such a critical moment along my recovery path. “How do you know she didn’t remember?” I sat baffled and thought for a while, where did I get that idea from?
I had to admit I didn’t know; I had assumed she didn’t remember. This lie was a coping mechanism at an early age with the knowledge that I had available. I created this lie around six years old, it allowed me room in my life to believe that she still loved me and just did not remember how she treated me. It provided me a reason to ignore the abusive behavior and not to personalize it and make it about me because she didn’t realize what she was doing. A therapist can provide you perspective by listening to how you describe the events and question aspects that might not add up.
A therapist is a great way to start identifying coping mechanisms and survival habits that are keeping you from recovery.
Bonus Tip) If you’ve got some flexibility, consider the time and day of the appointment.
If you are handling painful trauma topics, you might want to wait until after work or at the end of the week when you can go home and sleep afterward. Appointments might be very tiring depending on what needs to be covered. Lunch appointments can make it challenging to go back to work teary-eyed. The time and day of your appointment might be essential to consider. For more tips on how to get the most out of therapy, check out an earlier article, How to Get 110% Out of Therapy.
