5 Simple Ideas to Make Your Therapy Sessions Wildly More Effective If You’re A Therapy Skeptic
by Lynn Maleh
I really want to be that friend who’s always raving about how life-changing therapy is.
I want to say, “My therapist told me this, and now all my relationships are healthy, my career is taking off, and my house/car/life is perfectly organized.”
The truth is, when I talk about therapy it usually sounds more like: “My therapist told me this, and I can’t tell if it’s useful” or “My therapist told me that, like I don’t already know.” If you, like me, are a therapy skeptic, just know— we’re not alone. One out of every five therapy patients quits before finishing treatment.
But therapy isn’t about asking a stranger to fix things for us or solve our problems. In reality, therapy is work that we have to do. So to really get the benefits of therapy, we have to decide to actively engage in it.
To do that, here are five therapist-approved tips for getting the most out therapy even if you’re not entirely sure you believe in it.
1. Be authentic.
According to NARM Institute trained therapist Shavvonne Walls, skeptics need therapy as much as anyone.
“Those who are overly skeptical, tend to be critical, cynical, and shut off. Psychotherapy can help them unlock why they have so much trouble opening up or why they don’t believe self improvement is possible for them,” says Walls.
Walls’ top tip for making the most of therapy sessions: Be honest.
While this sounds obvious, 93% of patients have reported lying to their therapist at one point or another. “Approach your sessions like a course, where the topic is YOU,” adds Walls. “By being honest, you will dive deeper and learn the most about yourself.”
2. Speak up about your needs.
A relationship with a therapist is just like any relationship. In order for it to be successful, we have to communicate our needs. If therapy isn’t working, we have to think critically about how our needs are being addressed, and if this is the right therapist for us.
A helpful way to address our needs to a therapist is to employ one of the healthy relationship strategies from The Gottman Institute, which is to “complain without blame.” If therapy doesn’t feel like it’s working, there’s no need to jump to blaming the therapist or the institution of therapy all together. Instead, we have to ask ourselves:
What am I feeling?
What do I need from my therapist in this situation?
“If you feel misunderstood, I would encourage you to share that as that will help your therapists understand you better,” writes Jessica Grace for The Gottman Institute. “If you share with them what works vs. doesn’t work for you, they can then adjust how they work with you and your relationship.”
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3. Get ready to improvise.
Don’t worry, we’re not talking about zip-zap-zop-ing with a room full of strangers. What we mean is showing up to therapy…unprepared. Sorry, Type A personalities.
The Gottman Institute’s Lori Gottlieb urges patients to resist the temptation of having “their opening line all ready to go.”
While it may feel counterintuitive, bringing a list of talking points to a session doesn’t necessarily generate the most rewarding, authentic conversations.
“The most productive sessions tend to be those in which there’s no agenda, no point to prove, where you come in and take some breaths, feel your body, ground yourself, and see where your mind goes. Wherever that is tends to be what they really need to be talking about. Not the rehearsed script,” explains Gottlieb.
4. Ask for actionable advice, and use it.
We are skeptics because we question things. Which means we probably question ourselves all the time, which is why a therapist’s conclusions might not sound that enlightening.
So instead of phishing a therapist for insight, ask for concrete behavioral changes, and then—and this is the hard part—make them.
“If you want to get the most out of therapy, you’re going to have to do something different after you leave each week,” writes Gottleib.
End each session by agreeing on an actionable step.
5. Remember that something is more than nothing.
If it feels like “therapy isn’t doing anything,” remember that therapy is doing more than nothing. Each session unlocks another benefit.
And at the very least, we are taking the time to think about and verbalize our feelings with someone who doesn’t carry personal biases about our lives. Often, that’s the work itself.
“Be mindful of the cost of not doing anything about your emotional health,” says NARM® Therapist Diane Nguyen. “At least try something, so that the ball gets rolling. Though therapy may not be right for your struggle, the therapist and yourself might discover during the process that there are other ways or other resources that could help instead.”
More often than not (and especially with skeptics), there is a clunky onboarding period with therapy. If we’re willing to sit through the discomfort, we’ll eventually find what works.
“There are many types of therapies,” says Nguyen. “The better your therapist gets to know you, the better equipped they are to refer you to the right kind.”
A 2016 study found that while psychotherapy is proven to improve quality of life, what really makes it successful is how the treatment is individually tailored. So once we’ve done the grueling work of finding a therapist who doesn’t set off any glaring red flags, the real work begins.
Growth takes effort. It’s uncomfortable. But if we get through it, we might even become that friend raving about the life-changing magic of therapy.
Lynn Maleh is a Syrian-American writer and comedian based in Los Angeles. By day, she writes online content, and by night she performs standup. See more of her articles here.
