By anonymous
TW: mentions of mental health that may be triggering.
A few months ago, a friend told me she was seeing a therapist. It took me by surprise and I now realize how ignorant this was. I’d always seen her as a pretty level-headed, resilient, and emotionally unshakeable person though we really have no idea what is going on in another person’s head, no matter the precedingly cool outer shell. She suggested that I should look into it too. However, despite being curious about psychology and, as a Gen Z’er, falling into what has by some been branded the ’emotionally intelligent generation’, a part of me had always believed I would be wasting the therapist’s time. I believed there was nothing that wrong with me, and nothing that bad had happened to me.
Granted, life had its ups and downs. I sometimes argued with those dearest to me, and I was by no means without my emotional flaws. I’d thankfully managed to wade through most of the stressful periods of my life reasonably unscathed. Yet, this conversation had planted a seed, and a few days later, I found myself crafting an email to their therapists’ receptionist to book my first session. According to the British Medical Association, thousands of patients every year undergo waitlists of over six months to two years before gaining access to therapy, and the time these patients are having to wait is rarely monitored by NHS staff. I recognize how truly privileged I am to be able to even book this session and gain the knowledge I did going forward…
What I’ve learned since then is that one of the most flawed misconceptions about therapy is that it is only helpful for alleviating the most severe events or diagnosable conditions. There were so many new perspectives to form, scenarios to reframe, and destructive habits to uncover that would lead me to find new ways to live a fuller life.
Therapy taught me how to recognise my love language (how we best receive love from others), so I could be open and direct with my needs, allowing me to communicate in my relationships more like an adult and less like a sultry child. It helped me understand that trauma, like heirlooms, genetic conditions or physical characteristics, can be inherited from parents and grandparents (something first investigated by psychologists in 1988, who found that the children and grandchildren of holocaust survivors were overrepresented by 300% in psychiatric referrals). Whilst my parents were, fortunately, not victims of horrendous war crimes, they had no doubt unintentionally passed forms of trauma and emotional hardship down to me. These ranged from: sexual assault, infidelity, loss, and regret had all covertly revealed themselves in me, surfacing through nuances I was inadvertently taught in childhood, and which, in various ways, would go on to impact my personality, relationships, self-esteem and worldview for better or worse.
‘It helped me understand that trauma, like heirlooms, genetic conditions or physical characteristics, can be inherited from parents and grandparents (something first investigated by psychologists in 1988, who found that the children and grandchildren of holocaust survivors were overrepresented by 300% in psychiatric referrals)’
So I now recognise that counselling doesn’t have to be a means to an end. It can be preventative too. It’s a way to understand the messy spectrum of human emotion by understanding ourselves and our past. We make room to feel the depths of positive emotions more authentically. And if regular therapy is the latest instalment in the Gen Z/Millennial quest for self-betterment, following on from spin classes, self-care products and self-help books, then we should fully endorse it. A generation dedicated to growth, interrupting vicious generational patterns, and pursuing open communication unpolluted by insecurity can only be a step in the right direction. It would be naive to assume stigma is the only barrier to accessing therapy (availability and affordability being perhaps more significant determinants).
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