Does Therapy Make Us Selfish?
After reading the “Am I Selfish?” post, I’ve had some readers and clients asking me: “Does therapy make us selfish?”. I thought I would take the time to answer that question.
As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I believe that therapy is for everyone. In our atomized, hyper-individualistic, fast-paced, digitally-focused modern world, people express to me having less face-to-face time with loved ones and friends and do not feel as though they have a close community around them to support them. In some ways, I wish therapy were not necessary. I wish everyone had enough physical, mental, and emotional support built into their communities. However, for most of us, the reciprocal nature of our daily interactions with friends, family, and colleagues often leaves us feeling unheard, unseen, and misunderstood. Conversations with friends or families may focus mostly on one person or maybe interrupted as one person checks their phone texts or notifications. Therapy provides a safe space for you to be fully seen, heard, and understood for 50 minutes straight without interruptions. Is it selfish to want that sacred time for yourself to tell your story to a caring professional who will truly listen and even help?
I don’t think so.
I do not think therapy makes us selfish. I think investing in yourself by choosing to attend therapy is a radical act of self-care in the modern world. And self-care isn’t selfish. It is a time to tell our story uninterrupted, and get informed feedback and dialogue around the issues that matter to us most. Now, a therapist who blindly validates and supports everything you say without ever gently questioning your thoughts for potential cognitive distortions, or gently questioning your perspective in order to help you have a more holistic perspective on your situation, may indeed make you feel as though you’re always right and others are always wrong. I think this is a little dangerous. There is a potential to develop a selfish mindset that only privileges one’s own perspective as valid, and sees all others as invalid. This isn’t good therapy.
In my private practice, I honor my client’s thoughts, feelings, stories, and perspectives, but I also gently challenge them to consider things from other points of view if I feel that they have not already. I try to guide my clients to view their lives and relational dynamics from a place of wisdom - not selfishness. Using our wise mind means considering both our emotions around an issue, but also assessing the realistic facts or data points that may also be true outside of our emotional state. This incorporation of left-brained fact thinking with right-brained emotional feeling, once integrated, often leads us to wise-mind conclusions. My clients who are able to assess their life circumstances more wisely are able to handle various situations without being selfish or inconsiderate, but rather they are able to be considerate of their own wants and needs (discussed in therapy) and also take the other person(s) context, story, wants, and needs into account (also discussed in therapy) with more compassion and understanding, and are better able to consider the situation from all sides in a more holistic, not selfish, way.
Therapy does not inherently make us selfish. Therapy can help us understand ourselves more deeply, and become more self-serving in a way that improves our mental health and well-being, and allows us to show up better for other people in the world that matter to us. Therapy can also teach us how to set appropriate boundaries when needed for self-preservation and to protect the relationships that matter most to us. These boundaries teach others how to treat us and respect us, and ideally bring us closer together, rather than farther apart, by creating more emotional/mental/physical safety in the relationship. Talking to a therapist can help with all of these things. Just know that carving out 50 minutes of your week to talk to a licensed mental health professional is an act of self-care and self-preservation in the modern world. We all deserve therapy. We all deserve our own sacred time and space to process and express ourselves and truly be heard, understood, and accepted for the fullness of who we authentically are. Find a quality therapist who knows when to validate you and when to gently challenge you, and you can rest easy knowing that you are truly being self-serving, not selfish.
If you’d like to discuss this more, or are curious about how individual therapy could benefit you in your own life, feel free to schedule an appointment with me today! Just click the button below, and we can explore how therapy may benefit you in your life circumstances. You deserve a safe, non-judgmental space to share your story, and I can’t wait to listen.
