Once More From The Top

Starting therapy can be daunting for a lot of reasons, but I sometimes hear from clients that its hard to tell (or in some cases re-tell) your life story. It’s not easy to unpack all the different details and peculiarities of your life, map out your history and your family tree and your job and hobbies and all the quirks that make you you.

Some clients engage with this part of the process only reluctantly, wanting to skip ahead to the point where we pin down their exact problems and the solutions that will work. That’s totally understandable. After all, you’re not in therapy to just ‘talk’, you’re there to get better.

But the early fact-finding part of therapy serves two crucial functions, one quick and one slow. The quick benefit of telling your life story in therapy is that it will reveal any glaring lifestyle issues.

Our mental health is like an Oil Rig in a rough ocean. The platform stays above the waves only because it is standing on solid pillars. If one of the pillars crumbles (friendship, love, employment, exercise), then the whole thing is likely to go under.

The slow benefit of exploring your life story in therapy is that it’s a great way to slide into the deeper layers of healing. If the causes of your unhappiness are complex, then they are difficult for you to isolate and talk about. You need a way to find them ‘by accident’.

The surest way of doing this is to just start picking up threads and see where they lead. After all, even the mundane circumstances of your daily life were created by deep patterns and emotions that caused you to be who you are as opposed to someone else.

So there is a method to the (apparent) tedium of telling your life story in therapy. And if you engage with the process it can lead to exciting and productive therapy very soon.