This text is primarily for you if you have never been to psychotherapy. Even if we don’t know each other, I dare say you need psychotherapy for the simple reason that all people could benefit from going through a psychotherapeutic process at least once.

But I am not encouraging you to go to therapy all your life, in fact I advise you not to. Excesses in any direction are not good. Just as it’s not a good idea to never go, it’s not a good idea to go all the time.

I will now discuss a number of reasons people give for not going to psychotherapy. Unfortunately you might be tempted to cite these reasons especially when you need psychotherapy.

1. I don’t go to psychotherapy because I don’t have problems

Such a reason is unrealistic in the first place. Not all people have the same kind of problems and not all people experience problems in the same way but certainly all people have problems (including psychotherapists). We all have aspects of our lives that we wish were better: intimate relationships, friendships, relationships with co-workers, thoughts or behaviours of our own that we would like to change.

Saying you don’t have problems can be explained in two ways.

You’ve decided to deny the existence of the problem in the hope that ignoring it will solve it. I can tell you with a fair amount of certainty that there are very few problems that solve themselves. They usually either persist or get worse. The only way for a problem to solve itself is if there are changes in your environment or your life that are not of your making. But this is a lottery rather than a certainty: it may or may not happen. And the odds are stacked against you that it will happen.

You feel it as a weakness that you have a problem: The cult of individualism in today’s society disregards you as an individual if you are unable to fend for yourself. Even if you agree with this approach, the idea of being able to fend for yourself must be understood as such. Doing it alone does not mean living in isolation and taking on all the problems you encounter.

Being part of a society is precisely about having access to people with different skills, capable of solving all sorts of problems that you can’t solve on your own, because you don’t have time to learn all the things you might need in life. This is the main benefit of living in a group and a society: access to this resource of skills and talent. If it were not so, society would no longer exist, we would be talking about a mere collection of individuals acting on their own, indifferent to those around them.

In addition, when you want to solve a problem yourself, you lose sight of the fact that you cannot be completely objective when it comes to your own life and your own thoughts. This is why it is preferable to see a psychotherapist to ensure objectivity in the process of analyzing situations.

2. I don’t have big enough problems

Sometimes, people who understand that psychotherapy is a useful approach, still say they will only go when the problems are big enough to justify it. But when the problems become big enough (psychotherapists call this “being in crisis” – it is, of course, a psychological crisis) it becomes difficult to start therapy because the patient must first be stabilized and the crisis overcome.

Therefore, if you wait until the problems become big enough, you will only make the therapeutic process more difficult, taking longer than necessary or even making it impossible to intervene at that point.

If you’re worried that the psychotherapist will kick you out of the office by laughing at you: “Get out of here, mister, you don’t have enough problems, come when you have something serious to discuss”, I can tell you that it is not a well-founded fear.

Even assuming absurdly that you don’t have serious problems (although, as I say, you’d better not wait until they get really serious), the mere fact that it seems to you that something is wrong indicates that something is wrong: maybe it’s anxiety, maybe it’s a lack of purpose in life, maybe it’s depression masquerading as dissatisfaction. Either way, something is there.

That’s why there’s no such term as “psychological hypochondria,” because hypochondria itself is a problem that needs to be addressed.

3. I have too many problems

It’s an argument less often heard but more prevalent nonetheless than we might be tempted to believe at first glance. The principle that the person who comes up with this argument goes by is “if it ain’t broke why fix it”. The patient thinks that he is in fact overwhelmed by problems but feels lucky that he has not yet reached a crisis and at the same time fears that if he goes to psychotherapy, the psychotherapist will “scratch” those problems by bringing them all to the surface.

At this point fear may seem justified, many of us would feel overwhelmed if we were suddenly faced with 100 different problems.

Happily, however, this is not the case.

I want to tell you two things about this:

There is very little chance that you have as many problems as you think you do or that you are as “sick” as you think you are (actually in psychotherapy they don’t use the term “sick”, they just use it here for impact).

Even if you’re right and have a lot of problems, psychotherapy works on the domino principle. Those many problems have common threads and can be traced back to a few (2-3) common causes. So, what seem like 100 problems are actually manifestations of those 2-3 root causes applied to different life situations (personal life, professional life and so on).

That’s why psychotherapy shouldn’t take years because the psychotherapist shouldn’t take all those manifestations and analyze them one by one. The point is to go to the cause and address it. After that the patient’s psyche starts working on its own and will resolve more and more of those manifestations without the assistance of the psychotherapist.

You should go to psychotherapy when you feel something is wrong in your life, not when you have no other option. Don’t put off going just out of convenience.

Solving the things we are not happy with in our lives is not a luxury but a necessity. Especially when you consider that the psychotherapeutic process frees up inner resources that can be put to much more useful use in achieving your personal constructive goals: those that have to do with making your life and the lives of those around you better.

Your mental energy should not be excessively diverted by the process of coping with unpleasant situations or behaviours.