Feel better. Think better. Be better.

I do hope you don't find my ramblings about therapy boring. But if you do, I mean, there are like a zillion other things you could be reading on the internet right now. (I recommend starting here and then going here and playing the ol' news-or-Onion game).

Okay, now that we have that part out of the way: therapy! It's great. I finally get the whole thing they say when you're training to be a therapist about how you should it might be better if you would also go to therapy. Do the work. Yes. So now I do therapy, and when I'm not doing therapy, I'm testing, and it's a pretty great balance for me. And when I'm not doing either of those things, I'm working on my own therapy with Neil. (And parenting and cleaning the house and watching Cycle 20 of ANTM on Hulu and drinking cheap boxed wine).

I digress. Hold on, that's actually a thing. I'm trying to improve my storytelling skills and so far my beloved husband has encouraged me to stop with the superfluous details. I'll try.

So what do we do in therapy? I learned a lot in school - the theories, exercises, frameworks, diagnostic criteria. And I've learned a lot in therapy - the power of the holding environment, the empathy, the transference, the messy forging through the swamp of thoughts and feelings and experiences... the ambivalence and laughter and sessions that leave me drained for days. It's an incredible thing. Lately we've been dabbling in EMDR and the ol' Gestalt Empty Chair technique, two interventions I'm certain I raised my eyebrows at while I was a student. They're difficult to adequately explain, difficult to do, and amazing.

I've been thinking about therapy often, and pondering its mysteries. Neil has this three-layer take on it called feel better, think better, be better. I visualize it as the layers of the earth. All of them are good, and necessary. But they're different.


Feel better therapy is all about the low-hanging fruit. And it's good. Take a bubble bath, wash your dishes, read a book you want to read, spend time with people you like spending time with, get some sun, swim in the sea, don't listen to Bob Dylan. Feel better. Lists and advice and helpful, good things.

Think better therapy is taking it down to the next level. Lots of CBT goodies here. Thought distortions, rating scales, quantifying all the things, skill practice, homework. It works. It's pretty straightforward (which does not mean easy). It can change things. Like how with constant jabs Neil got me to go from saying I should do this and I should do that and I should feel this and I shouldn't feel that to saying, "It might be better if..." All of it feels so false at first, at least to me, but this is the level at which you can do things just for the sake of doing them and in an effort to see whether they'll take hold. Sometimes they do, and you find yourself being just a tiny bit kinder and gentler (usually to yourself).

Be better therapy. You know you're there when your therapist says something and in your head you're all "You really know how to cut to the core of me, Baxter." It's simultaneously the most difficult and the most fulfilling - I like to think that applies to the therapist and the client, though probably not equally. You get to explore existential questions and observe yourself through someone else's eyes. You experience, I mean really experience, deep wells of emotions and wonder at the process. You open yourself up to the possibility of being and doing big things. Things that maybe definitely weren't part of your controlled and restricted life plan. You doubt you can do it. Your therapist knows you can. And you let that trust carry you.

It's an amazing thing.

And because it takes 10,000 hours... or ten to fifteen years, according to various reports, to feel really confident as a therapist, I have a long road ahead of me. But I'll keep doing therapy, on the couch and in the chair, and I'll get there.