Is therapy a luxury, or is that fear talking? (Part 1: Priorities and Values)
This post is something I have wanted to write for a while, but I've been scared to because it's a bit controversial. I kept thinking, "if I articulate this incorrectly people will get offended", but the reality is, even if I articulate it correctly, people are likely to get offended because I'm expressing an idea about a common reason for not seeking help.
(Also, my entire job consists of questioning people's (and my own) beliefs - and I find most people are receptive to this, even if they need a week or two to come around!!)
Part 1 will consider a few different ideas: (1) Necessary choices; (2) Long-term investment vs. short-term gratification; (3) Investment in what we deserve.
So, here goes...
Therapy is often considered a luxury item; that is, it's something we struggle to find money for in our budget.
(Now, I'd like to highlight that I'm not saying money is not an issue. Money, or lack thereof, is a huge concern for all of us, and this post is not meant to delve into the particulars of exactly how much money we have, etc. I am speaking more to what we allocate money to and what we deem important enough to spend money on)
The key here is my belief that everything in life is a choice, despite how little flexibility we may feel we have in that choice. For example, with the money I earn, I spend it on rent, food, miscellaneous "kid stuff", daycare, clothing, hair appointments, therapy... You could argue that rent, daycare, and food are necessities and therefore not choices. I believe that they're necessary choices:
- I choose to pay rent instead of squashing my family into my fathers house (for free), and I choose how much rent to pay based on the house/area I choose to live in
- I choose to send my kids to daycare, both for my own sanity/work and their socialisation/learning, instead of keeping them home 24/7
- I choose to get takeaway some nights instead of cooking, and I choose the foods I buy - I'm sure I could reduce my woolies bill if I stopped buying the organic, hormone-free chicken, but I prefer it, so I choose to spend more
The other items I spend money on are easier to put into the 'choice' category, because a hair appointment is not a necessity (who doesn't love the been-stuck-on-a-desert-island look?!), but I choose the frequency with which I go and who cuts it. This has similarity to my post "does frivolous expense = frivolous person?" - it's all about what we value and what we prioritise.
There are many different ways we can define "luxury" - cost, rarity, necessity, etc. - but I believe therapy often (not always, but often) falls into this category because it's not considered a priority. Returning back to the idea that everything in life is a choice, including what we spend our money on, I think most of us choose to allocate money (and time) to things other than therapy because we don't believe it has as much value for us, or should be as much of a priority.
Why?
Therapy works on long-term commitment and change, while retail therapy and nights out drinking are short-term instant gratifications. In the moment, they seem like a better option. We have been evolutionarily programmed to respond to instant gratification (dopaminergic pathways, etc.) because our brains evolved in a time where our survival until tomorrow wasn't as secure as it is today. So, a quick gratifying experience was worth more to us than one that took weeks or months to achieve, because being alive in weeks or months wasn't guaranteed. It is perfectly sensible. Unfortunately, we still operate that way despite having secured our survival until old age.
(I am aware that not everyone survives until old age, and things like cancer and accidental deaths still take the lives of young people - my family has suffered through this. However, our life expectancy as a species is substantially longer than it was before and our chances of dying from many of the things that plagued our ancestors are much smaller. I am also speaking from a middle class life position in Sydney, Australia - but we'll focus on the broad point instead of diverting attention)
Speaking of privileged positions... many of us live in places and homes where our basic physical needs are met and we have opportunities for education, travel, pursuing our dreams and focusing on our 'higher-order' needs (see Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - an old model, but useful as an outline). We have the ability to visualise life as happy, positive, joyful, etc... and we have been raised with the idea that life should be all of these things. Unlike previous generations, we've been brought up with an expectation that life plays fair, and opportunities and happiness are basic life rights.
(It would be amazing if it was, and we'll keep trying to make it so. But just because we want it doesn't mean it exists right now)
Therapy is a big cash investment for something that we deserve to have, right?
We don't prioritise the investment because we don't value the investment as something we 'should' spend money on. Happiness should be freely available to us, and life eventually will get better because it should; it's supposed to be fair. You could think, "no, I don't believe that - happiness takes work, just like everything else". That's your consciousness baulking against the idea that you could hold easily-falsifiable beliefs. Let's look at your actions instead; your approach to the world. Do you behave in a way that indicates you subscribe to this belief? Do you behave in a way that indicates this belief is what you want to believe - do you behave hopefully?
Someone recently said to me, "I'm only upset when bad things happen, otherwise I'm fine". This statement is saying that once the stressful event is over, life will be ok. We know the problem with behaving as though "once X happens, I'll be happy" - the avoidance version of this ("once Y stops, I'll be happy") is just as problematic. This person is behaving in line with the belief that happiness will come because that's how the world works - it's freely available and they are deserving.
I remember starting out watching Game of Thrones and I kept thinking, "wow, they're getting further and further away from Winterfell... their family is divided, I wonder how they'll fix it". If you've watched the show you'll realise how funny that is - they're never going to fix it, I'll be waiting forever. Instead, they're going to adapt and create something new. But I was thinking in line with the belief that life eventually must get better and people deserve happiness, so it would come.
There is no 'deserving' happiness; life isn't easy and it has never been easy, for anyone, ever. It's easier for us than our ancestors in terms of survival and opportunity, but as those things have become easy, we struggle in other ways - especially with purpose, depression, anxiety, loss of community, spread out families, etc. That does sound pessimistic, but I don't believe so; just because life itself isn't automatically easy doesn't mean you can't do something about that reality and create your own 'happy'... But it doesn't happen from expecting and waiting. It happens with choices and actions.
Because we prioritise gratifying experiences over long-term investments, and expect life to get easier, we continue to march along in the struggle and remove expenses like therapy from our budget (both monetary and time). We make a choice, and justify that choice, with varying reasons that often skirt around the underlying reason. This places us at the centre of a world where we feel we have no control; where we differentiate between luxury and necessity, rather than recognising values and priorities.
Obviously there are a lot of factors that go into choosing what we spend our money on, and I'm not narrow-minded enough to believe that one thing determines it all. I am also a therapist, so you probably believe my opinion is a little biased. But I got into this profession because helping people is high on my value system - I have been at the edge, wondering whether it's worth continuing to live, and I hate the thought that other people are there.
What I'm trying to do here is spark some curiosity about:
1) What you value and prioritise
2) How your actions and thoughts align or deviate from that
3) Whether your current actions are helping or hindering you be who you want to be
...and use that curiosity to make choices that create the conditions for you to be less depressed, less anxious, less stressed, and (drumroll, please) HAPPY!
I'm not saying it to get you to come and do therapy with me - go and see someone else! I'm saying it because so many of us under-prioritise our mental wellbeing and watching that happen breaks my heart. It's not a given, but it's not a luxury either. Your mental health is worth prioritising. Help is there, if you choose to engage with it.
Part 2 delves into the second part of the title question: Is that fear talking? We'll look at how terrifying therapy can be, what you think you're afraid of, and what might be lurking that you're unaware of.
(Also, my entire job consists of questioning people's (and my own) beliefs - and I find most people are receptive to this, even if they need a week or two to come around!!)
Part 1 will consider a few different ideas: (1) Necessary choices; (2) Long-term investment vs. short-term gratification; (3) Investment in what we deserve.
So, here goes...
Therapy is often considered a luxury item; that is, it's something we struggle to find money for in our budget.
(Now, I'd like to highlight that I'm not saying money is not an issue. Money, or lack thereof, is a huge concern for all of us, and this post is not meant to delve into the particulars of exactly how much money we have, etc. I am speaking more to what we allocate money to and what we deem important enough to spend money on)
The key here is my belief that everything in life is a choice, despite how little flexibility we may feel we have in that choice. For example, with the money I earn, I spend it on rent, food, miscellaneous "kid stuff", daycare, clothing, hair appointments, therapy... You could argue that rent, daycare, and food are necessities and therefore not choices. I believe that they're necessary choices:
- I choose to pay rent instead of squashing my family into my fathers house (for free), and I choose how much rent to pay based on the house/area I choose to live in
- I choose to send my kids to daycare, both for my own sanity/work and their socialisation/learning, instead of keeping them home 24/7
- I choose to get takeaway some nights instead of cooking, and I choose the foods I buy - I'm sure I could reduce my woolies bill if I stopped buying the organic, hormone-free chicken, but I prefer it, so I choose to spend more
The other items I spend money on are easier to put into the 'choice' category, because a hair appointment is not a necessity (who doesn't love the been-stuck-on-a-desert-island look?!), but I choose the frequency with which I go and who cuts it. This has similarity to my post "does frivolous expense = frivolous person?" - it's all about what we value and what we prioritise.
There are many different ways we can define "luxury" - cost, rarity, necessity, etc. - but I believe therapy often (not always, but often) falls into this category because it's not considered a priority. Returning back to the idea that everything in life is a choice, including what we spend our money on, I think most of us choose to allocate money (and time) to things other than therapy because we don't believe it has as much value for us, or should be as much of a priority.
Why?
Therapy works on long-term commitment and change, while retail therapy and nights out drinking are short-term instant gratifications. In the moment, they seem like a better option. We have been evolutionarily programmed to respond to instant gratification (dopaminergic pathways, etc.) because our brains evolved in a time where our survival until tomorrow wasn't as secure as it is today. So, a quick gratifying experience was worth more to us than one that took weeks or months to achieve, because being alive in weeks or months wasn't guaranteed. It is perfectly sensible. Unfortunately, we still operate that way despite having secured our survival until old age.
(I am aware that not everyone survives until old age, and things like cancer and accidental deaths still take the lives of young people - my family has suffered through this. However, our life expectancy as a species is substantially longer than it was before and our chances of dying from many of the things that plagued our ancestors are much smaller. I am also speaking from a middle class life position in Sydney, Australia - but we'll focus on the broad point instead of diverting attention)
Speaking of privileged positions... many of us live in places and homes where our basic physical needs are met and we have opportunities for education, travel, pursuing our dreams and focusing on our 'higher-order' needs (see Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - an old model, but useful as an outline). We have the ability to visualise life as happy, positive, joyful, etc... and we have been raised with the idea that life should be all of these things. Unlike previous generations, we've been brought up with an expectation that life plays fair, and opportunities and happiness are basic life rights.
(It would be amazing if it was, and we'll keep trying to make it so. But just because we want it doesn't mean it exists right now)
Therapy is a big cash investment for something that we deserve to have, right?
We don't prioritise the investment because we don't value the investment as something we 'should' spend money on. Happiness should be freely available to us, and life eventually will get better because it should; it's supposed to be fair. You could think, "no, I don't believe that - happiness takes work, just like everything else". That's your consciousness baulking against the idea that you could hold easily-falsifiable beliefs. Let's look at your actions instead; your approach to the world. Do you behave in a way that indicates you subscribe to this belief? Do you behave in a way that indicates this belief is what you want to believe - do you behave hopefully?
Someone recently said to me, "I'm only upset when bad things happen, otherwise I'm fine". This statement is saying that once the stressful event is over, life will be ok. We know the problem with behaving as though "once X happens, I'll be happy" - the avoidance version of this ("once Y stops, I'll be happy") is just as problematic. This person is behaving in line with the belief that happiness will come because that's how the world works - it's freely available and they are deserving.
I remember starting out watching Game of Thrones and I kept thinking, "wow, they're getting further and further away from Winterfell... their family is divided, I wonder how they'll fix it". If you've watched the show you'll realise how funny that is - they're never going to fix it, I'll be waiting forever. Instead, they're going to adapt and create something new. But I was thinking in line with the belief that life eventually must get better and people deserve happiness, so it would come.
There is no 'deserving' happiness; life isn't easy and it has never been easy, for anyone, ever. It's easier for us than our ancestors in terms of survival and opportunity, but as those things have become easy, we struggle in other ways - especially with purpose, depression, anxiety, loss of community, spread out families, etc. That does sound pessimistic, but I don't believe so; just because life itself isn't automatically easy doesn't mean you can't do something about that reality and create your own 'happy'... But it doesn't happen from expecting and waiting. It happens with choices and actions.
Because we prioritise gratifying experiences over long-term investments, and expect life to get easier, we continue to march along in the struggle and remove expenses like therapy from our budget (both monetary and time). We make a choice, and justify that choice, with varying reasons that often skirt around the underlying reason. This places us at the centre of a world where we feel we have no control; where we differentiate between luxury and necessity, rather than recognising values and priorities.
Obviously there are a lot of factors that go into choosing what we spend our money on, and I'm not narrow-minded enough to believe that one thing determines it all. I am also a therapist, so you probably believe my opinion is a little biased. But I got into this profession because helping people is high on my value system - I have been at the edge, wondering whether it's worth continuing to live, and I hate the thought that other people are there.
What I'm trying to do here is spark some curiosity about:
1) What you value and prioritise
2) How your actions and thoughts align or deviate from that
3) Whether your current actions are helping or hindering you be who you want to be
...and use that curiosity to make choices that create the conditions for you to be less depressed, less anxious, less stressed, and (drumroll, please) HAPPY!
I'm not saying it to get you to come and do therapy with me - go and see someone else! I'm saying it because so many of us under-prioritise our mental wellbeing and watching that happen breaks my heart. It's not a given, but it's not a luxury either. Your mental health is worth prioritising. Help is there, if you choose to engage with it.
Part 2 delves into the second part of the title question: Is that fear talking? We'll look at how terrifying therapy can be, what you think you're afraid of, and what might be lurking that you're unaware of.
Sophie Gray
sophie.gray@thinkgray.com
www.thinkgray.com
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