FAQ
The analogy of “going deep” is about getting to the bottom of things, and in psychology that has a lot to do with the way you developed in your first few years of life, how that development shaped your personality and the ways it taught you to cope with life’s difficulties. The reason this stuff is “deep” is because we’re not really aware of it – and “going deep” is just making the unconscious conscious so that we’re more free to make choices instead of habitually following these patterns.
Some therapies are sold as “insight oriented” and others are sometimes billed as “somatic,” which means they work with the body. Both kinds of therapies can be very helpful, but they can sometimes give the impression that we just “are” minds or bodies. The reality is that human experience is about BOTH minds AND bodies – and the issues that bring us to therapy can’t easily be divided between the two. To “get better” in therapy is to begin having different experiences, and “experience oriented” therapy is not just about processing/talking about experiences, but about actually HAVING those healing experiences together in session.
There’s a lot of popular buzz around “attachment styles”, but in human development attachment goes deeper than a relational style. To be “attachment centered” is to understand every aspect of psychological suffering and health in terms of relationship – our ability to relate to ourselves, our circumstances, other people, even ideas. In other words, the broken parts of us were formed in relationship and they can only be healed in relationship – so therapy should be a special kind of healing relationship.
Lots of other therapists care about relationship, in lots of different kinds of therapies. Without getting into all the confusing acronyms (CBT, IFS, EMDR, ACT, DBT, EFT, etc.) the foundation of our training as professional counselors is the therapeutic relationship, what’s sometimes called “common factors”. Likewise all therapists care about your family of origin and the patterns you’ve developed that are no longer working for you. The difference isn’t so much what we talk about than it is the way we work with what happens while we’re together. Rather than just learning strategies to manage thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, we pay close attention to the emotional and relational patterns happening in the moment—so that insight can become lived experience, and lived experience can become lasting change.
There’s no trauma, circumstance, illness or suffering that is too heavy to hold in a therapeutic relationship. But it’s important to know that just as the same medicine doesn’t work for everyone, there’s no single therapy that’s right for everyone and (despite what a lot of marketing claims) no silver bullet for mental health. If what’s most important to you that therapy is brief, relational therapy may frustrate you. If your primary struggle is with substance abuse, you may want to seek a different sort of treatment first, until you feel stable enough for this kind of work. There are also personality types which may simply find themselves needing more skills-based treatment. And of course since the basis of all good therapy is a human encounter, the personality of the therapist may just not be a fit. None of this means that you’re too much for therapy to help or that any one therapy is inherently better than another. It may just mean you haven’t yet found what’s right for you – so I hope you’ll keep looking!
You may be a good fit if you’re curious about yourself, willing to be emotionally engaged in therapy, and open to exploring aspects about yourself and way of relating that you’re unfamiliar with. You don’t need to be unusually articulate, in touch with your emotions or especially comfortable with vulnerability – but however you show up, being curious about it makes you a good fit. You don’t even have to arrive knowing exactly what needs to change or to be terribly thrilled about therapy; even the tiniest grain of curiosity can carry the work forward in the face of fear, confusion or skepticism.
What’s so beautiful about neurodivergent folks is that they tend to come with a hard-earned self-awareness; years of adapting, masking and striving in the face of misunderstanding and environments hostile to their existence have forced them observe their own thoughts, feelings and behavior. A lot of that curiosity has been laden with the shame of neurotypical messages, especially those that they absorbed in their formative years. There are unique factors involved in neurodivergent folks connecting more deeply to their own emotions and regulating in response to others – but none of these factors change the essential need for attuned, containing, secure relationship to heal. In fact, discriminated populations may have an even greater need for it.
This is not the part where I tell you that you can’t put a price on your mental health. Therapy is expensive, especially for results that can be very hard to measure. Even though there are ingredients that go into setting the price (years of experience, education, training, supervision, ongoing study, time spent outside the therapy hour, the impact of carrying emotional burden on the rest of a therapist’s life, etc.), the fact is that every person will have to decide whether it’s worth it to them. Rather than try to answer that for you, you might want to consider how much it is currently costing you to not be in treatment – not as a “gotcha” question, but a genuine assessment of whether you can wait, whether it’s important to get help now or whether it’s simply not worth the time, energy and money for you. Of course it’s not a zero sum question – you could opt to use commercial insurance or try other things before therapy, too. These options have their own risks and advantages to weigh.
Insurance can make therapy much more affordable, and for many people it’s the right way to access care. The tradeoff is that insurance companies generally require a mental health diagnosis and tend to organize treatment around medical necessity, symptoms, and measurable impairment. Unfortunately human beings don’t measure impairment the same way that economies do – because the economy is concerned that you are able to keep working and producing, not that you live a fulfilled, meaningful life. What this means, practically, is that the entity that decides whether your care is “medically necessary” may differ from what real people actually feel is necessary. The downside to private pay is that you bear the cost directly (though insurances will often reimburse you for at least part of it) – but the upside is that what we work on, how long it takes and what you decide is important will be determined by you rather than an auditor in an office thousands of miles from your life.