Why therapy works

Notify of. Oldest Newest Most Voted. Inline Feedbacks. Siobhain Crosbie. Rosana Marzullo-Dove. Pre-Order our latest book! Latest Podcasts. Become a Member! Latest Magazines. Get the Apple App. Get the Android App. Would love your thoughts, please comment. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Some people are under the misapprehension that therapy is for wusses. Psychotherapy is a tool that creates success.

Smart people use it. This is perhaps the single worst thing you can do for yourself. Stamping down your emotions and not working through your psychological issues — especially serious pain or abuse in the past — can culminate in a host of problems. If you need a numbers-based reason to convince you, depression alone is a major player in the global burden of disease, the leading cause of disability worldwide, and responsible for billions of dollars a year in lost work.

Psychotherapy gets to the root. A huge benefit of talk therapy is that its effects are long-lasting. This makes sense to me because it suggests that we continue to use the reflective lens in thinking about, talking about and expressing feelings about our inner lives after we end treatment. The whole talking-with-the-therapist process gets internalized so that self-therapy picks up where the actual therapy leaves off.

The "getting-to-the-cause" aspect of therapy is a big reason why antidepressants and therapy together are believed to be most effective. Psychological trauma, or even general ennui, can trigger physical symptoms — and depression and anxiety are well known to have significant, and sometimes debilitating, physical effects. It acts as a barometer that reads: danger! Something is amiss and needs attention. Somatizing via stomach aches, headaches, sleeping problems, and ulcers are just some of the ways our body reacts to stress and psychic pain.

The most serious drawback of not talking about things may be that unexpressed feelings and traumas can pile up and explode later. If anything, they linger and fester, only to explode when an innocuous comment is made. So learning how to process them can change how you maneuver in many different ways. When you work through ancient or recent anger, it actually gets processed so that it no longer has to seep out passive-aggressively. Needless to say, psychotherapy is in the business of dealing with the intangible, making sense of the amorphous feelings that give rise to suffering, and, thus, this story perfectly captures the doubt that often dispirits both clients and clinicians in the healing process.

While many of these explanations would not feel radically new to the experienced reader, Cozolino adds an interesting perspective to already familiar principles by offering insight from his personal life experiences. According to Cozolino, humans need not feel helpless to their suffering — understanding and harnessing these evolutionary artifacts is the key to control.

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