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Although the stigma surrounding mental health and therapy is fading, it’s still there. Many people think of therapy as something you turn to only when you’re actively struggling with your mental health, or as something only weak and unsuccessful people use. For folks who do go to therapy for one reason or another, one of the most surprising side effects is suddenly discovering just how many people in their personal and professional circles are also in therapy, and have been for years. It’s almost a joke at this point: Everyone is in therapy and everyone is somehow ashamed of being in therapy.
There are an increasing number of convenient options in terms of online therapy platforms and providers—when you live in an age when you don’t even have to leave your house to engage in self-care, there’s literally no excuse not to at least consider the benefits of therapy. Here’s why you should see a therapist even if you don’t think you have any mental or emotional need for one.
Therapy can act as a preventive medicine
Essentially, therapy has two main use cases: It’s either used to treat illness, or it’s used to promote wellness. What most people think of when they think of therapy is the illness part: Someone is depressed, so they go to see a therapist to be treated. That’s where that durable stigma around therapy stems from—this assumption that it can only be used to treat a problem.
But therapy, like any medical intervention, can—and should—be used in a preventive way. If you go to your doctor once a year for a checkup, hit the dentist twice a year for a cleaning, and race to a specialist at the drop of a symptom, why in the world wouldn’t you go to a therapist at least once? Seeing a therapist when things are going great for you can provide a baseline of mental functioning that will be incredibly useful as you age and go through life’s challenges. Just as your physician tracks your lab results so they can see problems in the earliest stages, seeing a therapist can help you perceive bad habits, self-destructive behaviors, and unsustainable loops before they begin to obviously affect your mental health.
In fact, studies have shown that simply verbalizing your feelings makes them more manageable and also produces a wide range of beneficial physical responses in our brains and bodies. That’s why we feel better when we have a deep, emotional conversation with a friend or partner. Imagine having some level of that feeling on a regular basis, and you can see how therapy can help anyone avoid crises.
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Therapy helps you develop tools
The other benefit that therapy can provide people who don’t think they “need” it is pattern revelation. We all have subconscious patterns and tools we develop as coping mechanisms, and often these are invisible to us because we developed them organically, years and years ago—sometimes in our early childhood. They become just part of who we are, so we don’t even notice them as patterns.
Because you’re interacting with a trained professional, therapy can reveal those patterns to you—and knowledge is power. You might be professionally and personally successful and satisfied, but that doesn’t mean your patterns aren’t a time bomb. A good analogy is a baseball pitcher who has terrible form but manages to hurl 100mph fastballs—they might have early success, but over time their bad physical habits start to eat away at their effectiveness, and suddenly after years of success, they start to get shelled. Seeing a therapist can identify the bad mental and emotional habits you’re compensating for long before they become a problem.
Therapy can also help you with specific challenges that have nothing to do with a mental disorder, like conflict resolution, dealing with stress—even improving your sleep.
Therapy provides objectivity
Finally, therapy provides something that our personal support systems can’t: objectivity. Everyone develops a support system in their life. Some are larger than others, but we all have family and friends we can lean on, people we can talk to, people we can seek advice from. And that’s healthy and necessary—but your friends and family will not always or consistently be objective, because they have an emotional investment in you, and they’re dealing with their own biases, psychological patterns, and needs.
A therapist is an objective professional. You might become friendly and familiar with your therapist, but they aren’t your friend—and that gives them the ability to see your behaviors clearly and the authority to address issues as they see them, without worrying about offending or angering you or hurting your feelings. Even if you don’t have a diagnosed condition or aren’t struggling with depression, having an objective sounding board is an incredibly powerful tool that everyone can benefit from.
Therapy isn’t about failure. It’s about self-care. You might not “need” therapy in the sense of treating a problem, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t benefit from it—and really, you have absolutely nothing to lose.
