You sleep for eight hours or more every night, yet you wake up just as tired as you are at the end of a long day. You’re achy, and your head hurts. You type your symptoms into Google and you start to worry—it could be the flu, or maybe it’s something more serious.
Your doctor asks you what hurts; you think about it, and it feels like your whole life hurts. You tell your doctor about your aches and your fatigue. He takes your temperature and maybe sends some blood work to the lab, but to him, you seem perfectly healthy.
“How can what I’m feeling be nothing?” you think.
The answer is, if your doctor can’t attribute your pain to a virus or a broken bone, it doesn’t mean you’re fine. Depression, anxiety, and many other psychological conditions affect you physically in a way that your doctor might not necessarily have the time to properly diagnose and treat.
Sometimes life hurts. When it does, therapy really can help. Going to therapy doesn’t mean there’s something mentally wrong with you, it just means that you have things going on in your life and you need to talk it through with someone.
How can therapy help?
If you feel like life hurts, yet you can’t seem to get any answers about what you’re going through, therapy can help you sort through your feelings in a way that feels hopeful to you.
A therapist can help you identify patterns in your thoughts and behaviors and start to unravel the mystery behind your pain. Going to therapy doesn’t mean paying someone to “fix” you—instead, therapy helps you gain a better understanding of yourself and your environment. Therapy helps provide you with lasting tools for managing life when it inevitably gets a little overwhelming.
When can therapy help?
- You’ve experienced a loss – Maybe you’ve lost a job that made you feel good about yourself, or you had to say goodbye to a beloved pet. Maybe lately you’ve really been feeling the loss of your younger years. Loss doesn’t have to be dramatic to make you feel like your life hurts.
- You’re stressed – You have a demanding job, kids, and an equally busy spouse. You feel like when you get home you can’t unplug. When you have too much going on you can sometimes lose sight of caring for yourself and start to wonder why you’re feeling so badly.
- You’re worried about your relationships – Maybe you want to be a better parent or sister. Maybe you’re worried about a string of failed romantic relationships. Therapy can help you examine and understand how you relate to others and what might be getting in the way of building relationships that are truly meaningful to you.
- You wonder if you’re drinking too much – When you have a lot on your plate, you might pour yourself a drink. Sometimes you can learn to turn to alcohol or other substances to curb emotions you don’t want to deal with. Maybe it feels like you’re pushing problems aside and they’re piling up unresolved.
- You want to feel good about yourself – It can be so easy in life to get down on yourself, directing blame inward when things go wrong. From friends and family to magazines and movies, you’re almost always on the receiving end of pressures to be or look a certain way.
- Everything seems overwhelming – If you’ve been taught or have learned that being enthusiastic, sad, or emotional isn’t okay, you can come to feel disconnected in your life. Anytime something comes up, you might feel overwhelmed by and not know how to manage your emotional response.
Therapy can help in almost any situation, positive or negative. If your doctor can’t help, chances are, therapy can.
