Therapy and being yourself

Reflecting on what I thought was a successful set of sessions of therapy in 2023, I figure that maybe the basic result of (good) therapy is to turn you back to being yourself?

In late 2023, I did a round of therapy. I did six hour-long online sessions before I decided to ghost my therapist. I had figured then that I had got sufficient value from the sessions, and so I stopped.

This therapist was actually good, compared to the few I had seen earlier (I’m talking about therapists here, not psychiatrists. The latter are doctors with a license to prescribe medicines).

For starters, we didn’t talk about my mother at all (the one I’d seen earlier spent some five sessions just talking about my past without giving any solutions, and I’d gotten bored and quit). Instead we only spoke about (then) recent events and experiences, and how I had reacted to all of them. She had spent a lot of time trying to get me to “identify my feelings”, by looking at a feelings chart, etc. And I kept miserably failing at that.

A few months after this, I heard (indirectly) from someone else’s psychiatrist about how the purpose of therapy is to “learn skills”. In fact, I wrote about it here:

So, I started thinking back about what skills I had learnt in my therapy sessions in 2023, which I was (in hindsight) very happy about. I looked through my notes. I thought about what “aha moments” (I first heard that phrase in a McKinsey pre-placement talk in college) I had experienced in those times. It was on decision-making.

Decision-making

These therapy sessions all happened during my notice period in my last job. The job had gotten progressively stressful (I’d made some bad decisions there which had no doubt contributed to the stress), and my ADHD had been pretty bad at the time.

And one thing I was struggling then was in day-to-day decision making. The number of times when I would oscillate between decisions, not being able to make up my mind, was not funny. I even wrote a post about it on my ADHD blog.

Flip Flops

Through a bunch of conversations, we figured out a fairly simple formula (or maybe you can call it a “talisman”, with reference to what you used to see in the beginning of NCERT textbooks in India):

When in doubt, take the path that involves the least work at that moment.

As simple as that. So if I have a dilemma on whether “I can finish this one last thing before joining a meeting”, the solution according to this framework is “don’t do it”. If my dilemma is over whether to go for an event or not, the answer according to the framework is “don’t go”.

It was remarkably simple and remarkably effective. Until I started thinking more about it.

No Enthu Da

If you have bothered to pay attention to the name of this substack, you might have noticed it is “noenthuda” or “No Enthu Da”. This is a phrase that got associated with me in the mid-2000s, a couple of years before I started the predecessor of this substack.

It had to do with my apparent habit of not wanting to do anything. Back then I would always err on the side of not doing stuff, than on the side of trying to do too much and stressing myself out.

Which, if you think about it, is exactly the lesson that came out of my therapy in 2023!

What I have written above can be rephrased as :

When in doubt, “put NED” (say “no enthu da” and back out)!

Rediscovering yourself

One phrase that therapists like to use is “reprogram your brain”. It is not that they get into the neurons and literally change the neural networks, but the idea of “successful” therapy is that you will deal with situations in very different ways than you did before you went for the therapy (this is the “skill” you learn in the therapy).

Based on my one experience of “successful” therapy, I’m wondering - is the purpose of therapy to “discover your true self” / “be who you really are”?

All of us are susceptible to conditioning. If we go through mental illness, we are more susceptible to conditioning - for example, I remember this period where I got a lot of criticism for who I was and how I dealt with situatinos. I had then responded to market forces and changed, to become more of what I thought the world expected me to be, than what I really wanted to be.

Quickly enough, I remember finding myself being rather unhappy - because I was spending a lot of time doing what I “thought was the right thing” rather than what I really wanted to do. This was difficult to undo, because what was my ground state was something I knew a lot of people didn’t appreciate.

I had seen a therapist then, and not really liked her (I forget why - but maybe it had mattered that my mother had taken me along for all those sessions). She had made me take Rorschach tests and fill lots of questionnaires, and stuff. With benefit of hindsight, maybe if she had done a good job of “reprogramming my brain”, she would have made me undo all the results of my mental conditioning in the previous 1-2 years and become back myself?

Maybe therapy works because it is normally not easy for you (especially if you have some form of mental illness) to reprogram your own brain, discard your conditioning and become back yourself (actually the first time I took a long course of antidepressants, the overwhelming feeling had been that I had “become back myself”). And through the interviews and sessions and conversations, therapists (the good ones, at least) make you rediscover who you really are, and what you really think and believe, and slowly discard the conditioning you have forced upon yourself.

And apart from the skill in the therapy process, I guess the success of the therapy also involves the client’s willingness to become back themselves!