Since beginning this blog, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many people have reached out to me regarding going to therapy. For their own particular issues and reasons, there are ones who wish they had gone but never did, others who made their first appointment but never showed up, and then there are others who have gone for several years and continue to sing its praises.

The stigma around going to therapy is unfortunate yet so real. Before beginning this blog, I had only heard of two people in my life going to therapy. Hardly anyone talks about it, and there’s this concept that if you go to therapy, you must be crazy, weak, mentally ill, or all of the above.

But why?

Why don’t we treat mental health the same as we treat physical health? When we have an infection, we take antibiotics. When we have a headache, we take ibuprofen. When we break a bone, we get get x-rays and sometimes a cast. If we have allergies, we take Claritin.

Why then when we are feeling mentally unstable or having difficulties with life because we all know life is hard AF, do we not seek help in therapy?

Let’s bring this one step further. Most of us humans are terrible with the preventative. We frequently wait for something bad to happen and then deal with the consequences and react after the fact. Sometimes we don’t even know how to react because we have no idea what is going on.

Do we ever learn from our lessons to prevent the same things from happening again? History tells us we don’t. Sometimes it’s even too late.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who has been going to therapy for several years. I had a few questions regarding it, since I was and still am new to it all. My questions were as follows:

1. How often do you go to therapy?
2. How often should I go to therapy?
3. How do I know when I need to see my therapist?
4. What if I’m not having any problems at the moment?
5. What if I don’t know what to talk about with my therapist?

What I learned from speaking with her is that everyone takes a different amount of time to open up, process, digest, and apply things. That amount of time as well as the severity of a specific matter determines the frequency at which one would see a therapist. Some people need to see their therapist several times a week while others see their therapist every few months.

Everyone is different.

I also learned that I don’t need to wait until something bad happens before seeking therapy. Oftentimes, it is something bad that happens before we realize we need professional help. However, what happens when we’ve already talked about it, processed it, and practiced dealing with it?

What happens next?

I initially went to therapy because I felt like I was having serious anger issues toward the twins. After 3 sessions with my therapist, some external circumstances, and discovering that I actually had prenatal depression and was having postpartum anxiety attacks, I feel like I’ve progressed from that situation and am now better-equipped to handle future attacks.

So what next? I didn’t feel like I had any glaring issues that needed to be discussed right away, but I still scheduled and went to my following appointment with an open mind to learn more. I knew there was a lot more to talk about; I just didn’t know what it would be. What came out of that 4th session was not mind-blowing like the first few sessions, but was rather empowering.

We were discussing my last blogpost about mom guilt and my therapist educated me on the difference between guilt and shame, and how shamefulness leads to feelings of worthlessness (totally how I feel as a mom). Then we talked briefly about shame resilience and how the way we speak to ourselves, others, and our children can either shame them or develop their shame resilience.

Whoa.

Maybe it’s because I’ve always had a fascination with the things of the brain. Maybe it’s because I want to learn why I am the way that I am. Maybe it’s because I want to be able to better understand those around me. Maybe it’s because I want to be a better mom/wife/daughter/friend. Maybe it’s because now I understand how something that happened 15 years ago can still affect me in such a deep and serious way today.

Whatever the reason, I’ve had such positive and productive experiences with my therapy sessions so far that I can’t help but wonder why there is still such a stigma around it and why we don’t take it more seriously and treat it as a normal part of life.

At the end of the day, we are all complicated beings. There are so many things we internalize that affect who we are and how we behave today. There are deep-rooted reasons for why we are the way we are, why our relationships are the way they are, and why we react a certain way to specific things. There are intricacies of the mind that would take hours and hours of therapy to unpack. Why are these things not a priority to us?

Food for thought.