First Posted on July 23, 2010 by alisonball

Why does psychotherapy matter? It matters because people matter. We hear a lot of silly talk about psychotherapy being for elites or for “the worried well”. I myself might have been thought of by those people, as one of the “worried well”, but for me the journey into my own psychotherapy was life changing. On the  surface I am sure I seemed  and in fact had been, what is generally thought of, as quite a high functioning person. A teacher, a mother, a “mature age” student and a Social Worker. But for much of my life, the outside persona did not match with how I felt  inside myself. And, as a new social worker in the late 70′s, I was frequently surprised by the discrepancy I saw between the person in the public waiting room and the person they became once in the privacy of my office. Most of us go through life with some degree of such discrepancy between our public and our private selves but, for me and I know now, for many others, that feeling of living a sort of “half life”, became unbearable. People who look for psychotherapy are most often people like you and me; people who are often highly functioning in their jobs and in many areas of their lives. Sometimes the journey of bringing together- of integrating our inner and outer selves -can be excruciating; many cannot bear to even start the journey and many drop out along the way. You must be highly motivated to start the psychotherapy adventure and that motivation usually comes when the pain of living life as you currently feel much of the time, is so awful that you know you have to dare to venture on the unknown path of discovering yourself. For others the reason they decide to start on the psychotherapy journey is not so drastic. Some may just know in their gut or their heart that something is not right inside themselves, they know that they somehow inhibit themselves from reaching  the potential they envisaged for themselves or for which they have aspired. Others just know that patterns of their own behaviour mean that they cannot  do in life or be in life how they want to be or have the sort of relationships they want. Many of these people have tried lots of other ways and just a small number find their way to the door of a  psychotherapist who is a good fit for what they need at this particular time of their lives.

Social Work and