How Psychotherapy Can Improve Your Life

What does improving in therapy mean?

I’ve been doing this work for over twenty years, and I’m not exaggerating when I say I wake up most mornings asking myself, “What helps us heal?”

Lately, I’ve been on an angry rant about the very framing of this question. These little rants, I’ve learned, are part of my gem-polishing, idea-refining process. As I was writing copy for my website, I started to get annoyed with myself and our field. Who do we think we are to see people as needing healing? Even in the most challenging cases, where someone’s actions weren’t adaptive, their stories and why they acted the way they did always made total sense. The idea of “sick” and “healed” is part of the problem. The notion that there is a singular answer to being a good human is the problem. I get it. You may suffer a lot and want to suffer less. I want to help you with that. But I also want you to know there is nothing wrong with you. Your psychology is doing what it was designed to do. Don’t freak out—it doesn’t mean I’m so airy as a therapist that nothing tangible happens. But my approach isn’t one of “you’re broken, and I’m here to fix you.”

Psychotherapy improves our lives by helping us navigate complexity. To borrow from Dan Siegel, on one side of the river of your life is rigidity, and on the other side is chaos. Psychotherapy is a relationship that helps you make sense of your rigidity, your chaos, and the flow of your life—the river. We often have defense mechanisms that create both rigidity and chaos. However, when we get caught in the medicalized “broken and fixed” mentality, we miss a deeper element of therapy. Psychotherapy also helps us discover the hidden gems in the riverbed of our psyche. These gems reveal our soulful essence as we unfold. So, psychotherapy is both practical and impractical. We don’t want to be rigid or chaotic, as that won’t help us navigate real-world challenges. At the same time, we want to be guided by our own soulful why and purpose, which is much deeper than the trendy angles on growth seen on social media.

Feeling all the feelings together

I want to pause and share that I took this article into my own analysis. I see a gifted analyst with a PhD from the Jung Institute in Zurich and a Master in Freudian Psychoanalysis from the University of Madrid.  I work with him on my life and casework, and his words were stirring as he gave his ideas about how psychotherapy improves us. He said, “Psychotherapy is not always about helping people improve. Sometimes the health of the soul requires we fall apart.” You might think, “Wait, what? I’m depressed or so anxious I cannot get out of bed.” Yes, we want to cope enough, but as my friend, Psychologist Marty Cooper, says, depression is a failure to grieve something we lost, and anxiety is the denial that we could ever lose it. Sometimes, therapy involves facing harsh realities. The world is unjust. We start wars. We lose our jobs. People hurt us. We fail.  And sometimes, we have to fall apart for a time. I learned that after Carl Jung “broke up” with Freud, he sat by a river playing with sticks and stones, utterly incapacitated—a babbling mess. He was in a deep process of human loss. Psychotherapy is also about sitting with people in those deep processes and accompanying them in the underworld. I tell clients I bring food, blankets, and lanterns and keep them company as we navigate the dark.

Gaining a much bigger perspective on ourselves and life

Psychotherapy helps us improve our lives by cultivating a wide-angle lens on ourselves, including the dark and falling apart. We can observe our minds, behavior patterns, the social structures that weigh on our spirits, and bodies that react to different stirrings. This wide-angle lens may even consider generations before us whose DNA lives inside of us and shapes us.

Psychotherapy allows us to revisit and refine patterns and protection mechanisms that made sense when we created them. It also teaches us skills we didn’t learn. It’s a place to discover what we stand for beyond groupthink or the ideological zeitgeist. It’s a space to be a bit rebellious and practice stepping into different parts of you, even if those parts of you could get you fired in the “real world.”  It may be a place to learn to be less rebellious and know what it means to get along in community with others.  

Allowing for differences and diversity of identity and thought

Let’s talk about politics in therapy. I’m from San Francisco, grew up in Orange County, California, and now live in Europe. You could say I transitioned from the most politically conservative part of the USA to the most politically liberal. And now, I’m in Germany, which, despite some populist polarization, has more political diversity due to its multi-party system. This experience has shown me how the structure of a political system impacts the psyche. I studied political science as an undergrad when debating was a way to learn, not a life-threatening endeavor, so Germany feels more comfortable than the US. This background helps me embrace complexity when clients come to see me. Suppose I must see things exactly as you do. In that case, that reflects a problem with differentiation—meaning you haven’t cultivated the internal boundaries to stand firm in your beliefs without invalidating another person’s perspective. We collectively struggle with healthy differentiation right now. I have some ideas about why, but that’s for another post. I think therapy must be a place to explore your views and have your therapist help you inquire what shapes them.

Mental health is about flexibility.

Let me put it another way. The other question I wake up with every morning is, “Where am I rigid in my thinking, and why?” Early in life, I lived within a high-control religion. When I left, I became someone who welcomes diversity everywhere, including diversity of thought. I’ve become very comfortable changing my mind, holding two opposing views at once, and standing for my values without needing others to see things the same way. This has led me to believe that the greatest gift psychotherapy can offer is the capacity for inner democracy. We don’t have to rigidly hold on to one belief or only listen to one part of ourselves; we can welcome all parts of who we are. As we do this, we become more flexible; to me, flexibility is mental health. Rigidity is a flashing sign that says, “Ooh, dig in here—there’s a defense mechanism.”

Wholeness and Freedom Everywhere

So, how does psychotherapy improve our lives? It allows us to be whole and free. We become whole because we grow our capacity to meet all the parts of our being. We often have many opposing thoughts on the same topic, and therapy helps us hold the tension between them all. That is maturity. Psychotherapy helps us become truly free from beliefs, patterns, and even external structures that press in on us and develop into defense mechanisms. When we are free from these defenses, we can tolerate painful experiences, navigate complexity, and be gloriously authentic humans while simultaneously being valued community members.

Psychotherapy improves our lives by helping us all become whole and free. We then support others and create social systems that allow everyone to live whole and free.