Why a loved one may see a therapist instead of speaking to you.

It can be challenging when a loved one chooses to see a therapist, it can activate parts of you that may feel not good enough or abandoned. This is totally normal and will be felt by many people who experience their relationships this way, so I hope to help you understand why talking to you may not be enough for your loved one. I’ve broken it down into headings to help you pick out what you want or need to read most.

Self-awareness

Notice that I said talking to you may not be enough for your loved one, did you interpret this as “you’re are not enough for your loved one”? If you did, all that is helpful is to notice that this happened - judgement is rarely helpful. Noticing that you hear or experience things differently at times is helpful for your own self-awareness and it can be helpful when others lean on you for emotional support, because it helps you keep your stuff out of theirs. This is often one of the things that makes a therapist different to a client’s loved one. A therapist will hopefully have years of therapy under their belt, if not out of choice then because their training was robust and required them to. Personal therapy allows the therapist to know what parts of relationships they struggle with, it helps them work through it too, so that when something familiar in their own life is presented in their work with clients, their stuff is kept out of it.

A client - therapist relationship is different from that which you have with your loved one because the therapist doesn’t need their client to do anything for them, to look after parts of them, to validate them or “hold that thought because I’m dealing with something right now”. With the best intentions, it’s not possible or healthy to do this in all our close relationships - it’s important that you are validated, heard and considered and therefore sometimes, speaking about certain things can be a challenge for your loved one - because they care for you and your stuff, and in that moment, this makes parts of you unavailable to them.

In my opinion, it’s a strength of your loved one to identify this and to use this awareness to take action and find something else that can work.

It’s in the body

When I work with clients, words can only get us so far. I have invested heavily in my training, reading and experience of working with (my own and) clients’ neurobiology which allows me to help the client interpret the unspoken language of their body. It’s something I think as a culture, we haven’t been taught well and so we can often be brain heavy in trying to work through things or heal.

Did you know that only 3% of our memory is explicit?

We only have 3% access to verbal recall of our memory and the remaining 97% is implicit and lies deep in the subcortical regions of the brain - we experience the largest proportion of our memory in body sensations, images, feelings and other body/mind ways. Developing the skills to understand this can sometimes be a client’s biggest challenge and it’s OK that you can’t help your loved ones with this.

Regulation

Talking about our past can be really emotive and it’s popular opinion that talking about it and having a big cry is good for us. It can be, but sometimes it can overwhelm the nervous system, activating the body into fight/flight or shut-down, which means whilst there has been a lot of emotional energy spent, there is little therapeutic benefit, little healing and little progress.

It’s important that each client’s nervous system is understood so that the therapist can maintain regulation, allowing the client to perhaps feel emotion more intensely as time goes on so new neural pathways can be developed, but in a way that keeps their prefrontal cortex online so that therapeutic benefit can be experienced. A therapist needs to be confident they can do this and it’s helpful to have an array of grounding strategies as no one size fits all.

Fear

We all have worst case scenarios that we try to avoid in our relationships, we fear them happening and some of these scenarios don’t come from the actual relationship we’re in, but from relationships we’ve had. If a client has had strong messages that tears are weak or if they have experienced punishment when they have shown tears, it’s likely they’re going to struggle to go there in relationships, and therapy initially. Anger can be avoided through fear of hurting someone or fear of pushing them away if they really allowed themselves to show it.

The therapist and space offers a safe relationship to learn how to feel and be with all the emotions that have been exiled and pushed out of awareness or deep down inside. It’s safe because it’s predictable - it won’t call upon them when they’re not expecting, it won’t go for a drink with them and won’t judge and interpret.

Of course I feel and think about my clients in response to their process, but not from a place of needing or feeling hurt. I am able to feel compassion because this is our relationship and nothing more, I can hold space whilst they are irritated and critical with the way I handled something, I can offer my nervous system as co-regulation whilst they’re feeling hard and I can press the pause button or let them know that the session is coming to an end. We can do these things together because we both agree to, we’re contracted to be boundaried, safe and transparent.

I don’t mind sharing that I don’t always manage to offer this in my own personal relationships, because like you I am human - when I have a loved one that would benefit from therapy, I tell them who I would trust most. I can’t offer the space in the same way with someone I love personally - I feel their emotions differently, I want to rescue and sometimes I want to say exactly how I feel and what I think, regardless if it’s helpful.

You are a good enough human to the people you love, one person can’t tick all the boxes for us complex beings, and that’s OK. Love the way you love, feel the way you feel, help in the ways you can and that are deemed helpful to them - don’t beat yourself up because I doubt they expect what you’re expecting from yourself.