When it comes to your mental health, opening up sooner rather than later makes all the difference. By Gavin Demurger-Jones.
Most people think therapy is for when things have fallen apart. That you go when you’re unwell, when the anxiety has taken over, when you’ve run out of other options and there’s nowhere left to turn. Therapy as the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
I understand why. But I think it misses the point almost entirely, and I say that as someone who believed the same thing for most of my life.
Think about the gym for a moment. If you go when you’re already fit, you get stronger. If you go with an injury, you fix the injury, but you don’t come out stronger, you come out roughly where you started. Therapy works the same way. If the only time you ever sit down to think about your life is when something has gone badly wrong, you’ll spend that time repairing damage. Useful, necessary sometimes, but it’s a small part of what’s actually on offer.
I see this play out in the room. Every so often a client sits down and says, “I don’t know where to start, I’ve had a really good week.” As if the good weeks don’t count. As if therapy is a place you’re only allowed to bring the difficult things, and joy, or growth, or the sense that life is opening up, has to be left at the door. It doesn’t. Some of the most useful conversations I have are about what’s going well and why, and how to have more of it. People who come to therapy and give real attention to pleasure and direction, not just repair, tend to get something very different out of it.
The other belief I hear constantly is that therapy is a last resort. That you turn to it only once everything else has failed. And what usually sits underneath that is a whole set of coping mechanisms doing quiet work in the background. A glass of red at the end of a stressful day. Keeping busy. Coping mechanisms are not stupid, they work. That’s the problem. They work for a while, and then they don’t work every day, and then they start to cost more than they give. By the time therapy comes into it, people have often been managing for years.
Here’s what surprises them once they start, and it surprised me too. There’s a common assumption that talking is just talking. That they’re only words, and nothing can really change from sitting in a room describing your life to someone. I had that thought myself for a long time.
What I didn’t understand is what happens when you say something out loud to a person who isn’t invested in your decision. Not your partner, who has a stake in the answer. Not a friend, who wants to reassure you or fix it. Someone whose only job is to help you hear yourself think. That space is genuinely rare. It doesn’t exist anywhere else in ordinary life. And when you have it, and you’re with someone who knows how to hold it open, you start to work out what you actually want, rather than what everyone around you needs from you.
The therapist’s value, oddly, is in what they don’t do. In my own experience of being in that chair, the person opposite me didn’t hand me a solution. They didn’t tell me the secret answer. They helped me work out how I wanted to live and which direction I wanted to go in. That’s a different thing altogether, and it’s far more durable than advice.
I’ve had fewer older clients than younger ones, but the ones I’ve worked with have taught me something worth passing on. There’s an idea that as you get older, everything sorts itself out. That time is a healer and the past takes care of itself. From what I’ve seen, that’s only half true. I sat with a man in his eighties as he talked about his childhood, and it was profound for him, not resolved decades ago but alive and worth understanding. With another client we talked about the years he had left, and how many more summers he might reasonably expect to be fit and mobile. Not morbid, clarifying. When you hold a thought like that honestly, the question of what you actually want to do with your time becomes very real, very fast.
Which brings me to the regret I carry. If I’d found therapy at 25, I’d have sat down once a week and asked myself what I wanted my life to look like. Where I was heading. Whether the job I was in was even meant for me, it wasn’t, though it took me a long time to see it. I was busy. Busy with work, with the domestic things, with the garden, always doing. I was a human doing, not a human being.
That’s the misconception I’d most like to put to rest. Therapy isn’t only for the moment it all goes wrong. It’s the hour a week that stops you living the whole thing on autopilot. You don’t need to be in crisis to walk through the door. You just need to want to live your life a little more deliberately than you are now.
Gavin Demurger-Jones is Counsellor and Centre Director at held, based in Haywards Heath. More of his writing on mental health can be found at heldtherapy.space
