Why You Feel Therapy isn’t Worth the Investment.
Investment is something we take part in every day, consciously, and unconsciously. We invest in our friendships, we invest in our careers, our meals, our conversations, we invest in our personal belongings, from iPad’s to belts and shoes. When you make an investment, the hope is the time, energy, or money that you place into it will grow or bring greater things into your life. You want to feel that your energy and efforts are worth it.
It is much easier to invest in something that you can physically see. Something you can hold in your hands, or experience through your senses, like a Lana Del Ray concert, or Belly Dancing workshop. When it comes to investing in yourself, well that can be a different story. Therapy often gets disregarded as illegitimate, a waste of time, a scam, or unfruitful. It may not have a result, or object that you can physically see and hold. Add this in with the stigma that therapy holds in many spaces as only being something you come to when you “need it” or “too sick”, the self barrier to entering therapy gets pretty high.
In the world of quick “glow ups”, and “overnight makeovers”, where just with a click, and your Shopify code, a whole “new identity” can be bought. I am sure we’ve all experienced the feeling of being “lost” after a breakup or a career change and wanting to “find who we are”. In this lost feeling, we eagerly wait for 2-day prime shipping to keep its promise, bringing with it our new self. A “better self” is one where we are in alignment with trendy, and current “It person”. Because if we “become” the “better version of ourselves” that means everything is fine.
In this type of world, we have been taught to see ourselves somewhat like a paper doll. A base on which we can cut out and paste different hair, clothes, makeup, and jewelry and shift our whole entire outer self in one single Zara trip. While I don’t disregard the powerful nature of self-expression through clothing and makeup, there is one thing that can’t really make it into the shopping cart.
Your true authentic self.
Objects are not a replacement for your true authentic self, but an expression. However, we tend to focus on what we can see, vs the discomfort that is looking inwards. Instead, we ignore that core part of us. The one experiencing rejection from a lover, anger at our parents, dissatisfaction with our job and pay, sadness at the unspoken hurt and trauma we’ve experienced, fear that things will always be this way, and hope that things will get better. And so we shop and forget in fluorescent lights, and Ikea mazes. We assemble a capitalistic collage of who we want to be, a someone who is very far away from the current thing we are feeling.
When we ignore ourselves, we just tend to adorn what it is we are ignoring. With a temporary bandaid, we feel accomplished in crafting the perfect “new me”. How long does that last? I challenge that notion that the self is supposed to be trendy. Your true self is not a trend. It simply is.
Our core self informs everything that we do. Our thoughts, our feelings, our attachments, our goals, our relationships, our confidence, our actions, and our hearts. So why do we feel more comfortable endlessly browsing on ASOS, hunting down coupon codes that only really lift the cost of shipping, than reading a therapist bio on psychology today?
Internalized Capitalism is Preventing You From Investing in Yourself.
Internalized capitalism is this idea that our self-worth is directly linked to our productivity. Internalized capitalism joins the ranks of harmful attitudes towards ourselves, internalized sexism, internalized racism, and internalized homophobia. It creates internal systems of oppression held and supported by cultural attitudes so deeply rooted in everyday experience it’s hard to recognize.
It’s no surprise to us that capitalism affects our identity image. Perpetuated by the messages that feed on people's insecurities, since birth we have been advertised to. You’ve seen advertisements in media that tell you how you should look, be, feel, exist, and experience the world. It’s wonderful at creating dissatisfaction in yourself when inevitably you don’t fit that image and then selling the solution to you for the small price of credit card debt and a stuffed closet. Over time, it doesn’t just become about objects or how we look, but how we interact with others. A woman is “supposed to do this” in a relationship, a man is “supposed to do that”, and then the couple wonders why it doesn’t feel like “real love” like on the TV when they're both in their “roles”. We no longer feel value in ourselves for just being, but only as a human person “doing” or “acting like” or being “seen as” do we earn our value. It is a perpetual cycle of being dissatisfied, and when we notice that dissatisfaction or unhappiness, we jump back on the wheel of “how to be (trendy keyword here).”
You cannot buy real self, but you can invest in cultivating your true self.
So we come back to the main question.
Why Invest in Therapy?
Investing in therapy is investing in yourself, and that can be a scary thing to consider when you don’t feel worth it.
So I ask you, why don’t you feel worth it? Why don’t you believe you are worth your own time, energy, and attention. When it comes down to it, therapy is asking you to invest 50 minutes a week dedicated to just you. That’s the equivalent of a breaking bad episode or 90-day fiancé.
Not feeling like therapy is an investment doesn’t just boil down to cost. It’s the idea that you’re putting time and effort into exploring your emotions, your experiences, your inner self, after you’ve spent thousands of dollars, on treatments, sheet masks, seduction books (yes I’ve read Robert Greene), fashion nova Kardashian booty jeans, and lululemon leggings burying all of it down.
In therapy, we’re not looking at how you adorn your pain, we're working to heal it.
In therapy, we’re asking you to have a human experience, not a capitalistic one.
Therapy is an investment in not only yourself but your mental health, emotional and interpersonal growth. Each session grows the foundation for the space to intentionally improve yourself in the alignment of who you are and want to be.
