Hexagram 34 Unchanging (uc)
Or: How To Not Become A Gofundme For Your Therapist’s Next Car While Getting Nothing In Return
It costs too much to waste a therapy session.
Not only is it a waste of time, but some of you are potentially paying hundreds of dollars for the ability to sit in a chair and discuss the overwhelming waves of life crashing against your mind.
The truth is, your therapist gets paid whether you have a breakthrough or not. And if we're being serious: changing your life is too important to leave the process up to chance.
It's common to treat therapy like a past-life excavation, but it may be more helpful to think of it as 45 minutes of reframing.
You may be waiting for your therapist to upload every self-help book to your brain like you have a Matrix-esque cable jack in the back of your head, but as if I'm channeling some 1970s New-Age-Guru, I'm here to tell you to become the self-help book.
You can do that through thinking, writing, and questioning, before, during, and after your therapy session. We'll get into all of that here.
But if you're not in the right place mentally to talk about not being in the right place mentally, you may miss out on making a breakthrough. So, let's first talk about the mental side:
Addressing Your Mindset
The popular phrase that emerged with AI use was "prompt engineering." It's a dressed up way of saying 'ask the right questions', and really, it's a skill everyone should learn when they're trying to solve a problem.
In this case, the problem is of the mental health variety.
I have at least a decade of experience in therapy in the course of my life. And I've been guilty of spilling every major misfortune on to the desk of a therapist, prior to our ability to actually do so with a LLM that will happily hold your trauma as a reservoir to place ads next to in the future.
But that's not a skillful way of approaching therapy. All of those memories, all of that past strife, is not going to magically get you the answer to it all on the other end.
It's a process. A conversation. Like Hexagram 46.5, it's step-by-step.
But there are ways to not waste those steps. It starts with mindset:
1) Being OK With Being Told You're Wrong Sometimes
You don't go to therapy to think the same, because thinking the same made you want to go to therapy.
So, try to go in mentally limp-limbed, ready to try out new cognitive positions.
If this is a struggle for you, like it is for just about anyone, how do you accept the foul-tasting medicine?
2) First Figure Out If You Actually Want Change
Do you want to pay someone to be your forever-affirming friend? There might be therapists willing to take your money to do so.
So, figure out if you just want an ear to hear and confirm your suspicions, biases, and bad habits.
If you're willing to be a little more critical of your internal self, try reflecting on your reasons for therapy and ask:
How much are you willing to pay to keep this problem/belief/situation in your life?
Is it more attractive to stay with the familiar?
And if you're really OK with the therapeutic process, you should:
3) Decide To Not Vent Yourself Out of House And Home
Venting isn't really empowering. If it is, it's a fragile form of empowerment.
Self-righteousness or self-victimization has two things in common: too much self.
Insults, clever clap backs, and airing your grievances might feel good, but you're probably going to burn through your minutes without any workable solutions. Then you're out of that therapy session cash, and you get to have a higher blood pressure when you open your DoorDash app when you get home.
I say all that to say: don't be seduced by salt, because it's not a tool you're going to be able to use when life inevitably swings at you before your next session. Make your therapy pay you back, not help you get payback.
Or, go for it, and see if you're ultimately satisfied after talking more shit
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If you actually want to make a difference in your life, let's talk about ways to approach therapy (and what to talk about).
How To Know What To Talk About In Therapy
If I was starting therapy from the beginning, I would go about it differently.
At times you should treat your therapy sessions like you're trying to find out how to be a good therapist.
How does your therapist think about mental health problems, and what do they often use to solve them. It's like you're trying to get them to train the AI that's going to take their job, which might be the same AI that made you want to try therapy.
If you're utilizing a professional's services, you want to leverage their strengths. Someone with years of schooling, and in the best case scenarios, years of experience, have been conditioned to recognize patterns that you wouldn't pick up.
They know how this story usually goes. They know how people get out of a similar rut. They know about x or y model that could be helpful in solving your problem. Because, at the end of the day, isn't therapy mental problem solving?
So, what to do?:
1) Dump All of Your Thoughts Onto The Page
If your blank page is drawing a blank use some prompts:
A) If I had the ability to accomplish anything, I would ____
'Why haven't I accomplished that yet?'
Try to avoid listing the things that would require you to hit the lottery.
B) What do you want more of, and less of in your relationships?
C) What are your biggest insecurities?
D) What are your worst habits?
E) What are the worst patterns you've experienced in life?
F) What are your most common complaints?
G) What have been your most common complaints in the last six months, one year, five years?
H) What problem do you have that consistently pops up in multiple settings in your life?
Of course, none of this is fun to think about, but this is why we're here. You want to think about this stuff, and address it consciously in a therapeutic setting so you can stop thinking about it, and actually move forward.
You don't need to use all of these prompts all at once. The goal is ultimately to generate some ideas and then use a better criteria to choose just one of them for your next session.
2) Don't Try To Solve It All At Once
The Pareto Principle-80/20 rule of thumb isn't a hard rule, but it is a useful heuristic.
In this case, it means that 20 percent of the problems cause you 80 percent of the trouble.
A) If you have a list of some problems you might want to explore in therapy, ask yourself what you would want to talk about if this was your last therapy session?
B) If you start to get desensitized and that question doesn't work, rate each idea with a 1-10 for how urgent it is to solve, and a separate 1-10 for how important it is to solve.
When I use this rating system for urgency and importance I put it like: u9.5/10 -- i8/10. Then I look for the one with the highest combined total.
For example:
- Fear of public speaking is u7/10 (urgency) and i8/10 (importance)
- Social Anxiety is u9/10 (urgency) and i9.5/10 (importance)
- It's clear which you should bring up in therapy first
C) The last way to figure out the most important and urgent topic to talk about is: If you could wave a magic wand, what problem would you get rid of before any other?
This can be a quick way to find out what you value here more than anything else.
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Picking one of these methods will set you up with a clear target for your next session. Now, we do some more reflection:
3) Figure Out What Potential Solutions You've Already Tried To Solve Your Problem
Make a list of everything you've done to solve your current biggest problem.
If you haven't tried anything, that might be the problem. But in cases like that, ask why you haven't done anything to try to solve that problem.
Often, there's going to be an underlying anxiety that has you in a headlock.
Put pen to paper and put these thoughts into written words.
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I don't suggest you bring all of that writing to your therapist so they can decode your problems, but this process should get you a better sense of what target you might want to execute therapeutic drone warfare on.
Once you know what topic you want to bring up in therapy, there's some approaches to interacting with them and getting their wisdom on the situation:
Questions To Gather Together Your Therapist's Wisdom
4) Utilize Your Therapist's Opinion
Break out that number one subject you've identified, and then ask:
- What is your take on this?
If they tell you what they think, and they haven't explained their reasoning:
- Ask them Why they feel that way?
If your therapist has more experience with you as their patient, try asking:
- Based on what you know about me, why do you think I have this issue?
And more generally when they've worked with you over time, and you aren't looking at a specific problem:
- What do you think my biggest problem is based on everything we've worked on over time?
5) Utilize Your Therapist's Experience
- What's the most common reason why people fail to change for the better, based on your experience?
Or more specifically:
- What's the most common reason why people fail to change (x problem), based on your experience?
6) Utilize Your Therapist's Reframes And Frameworks
For a specific problem, ask:
- Is there a heuristic you've found to be helpful in dealing with x problem?
And as a general question:
- What's the most common problem, and the most common solution you've found with your patients?
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These are prompts/questions that can be used with different problems in different sessions. Just repurpose it, as necessary, because these are ways to look inside the head of someone that might have answers to the problems that have you banging your head against the wall.
You're not asking them for specific information about their other patients, or past patients, you're searching for the ways they think about these problems, and the patterns they've identified over time. Doing this will save you time, and also make you a more active participant in your self-improvement.
Last point, though:
7) You Might Want To Take Notes
I've had therapists in the past that have given me printouts of frameworks I could use at home, and I've found it much more helpful than trying to hold all of those suggestions in my head.
But if your therapist *doesn't* do that, bring a notepad and write down the stuff you think is really important: the insights, the suggestions, the thinking tools.
By taking notes you become a much more active participant in changing your life. Often your therapist is taking their own notes, so do it for yourself.
You don't want a week to go by and find yourself blanking on what they actually suggested you should do to solve a problem. Especially when wasted money is on the line.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, therapy is a long-term Socratic relationship, when done right.
It's about questions and hard thinking.
It's about reframes and change.
It's tempting to want to be proven right: that you're the main character getting stifled by villains that have malicious intent, but then you might end up as a narcissist making a weekly donation to the Church of Confirmation Bias.
As they say, 'garbage in, garbage out'. Or: 'you get what you put in'.
I hope for your sake (based on my experience), that you get told you're being an asshole, or plain dumb, in the kindest words possible, by someone with actual skills and tools to help you undo the mess we find ourselves in. Because sometimes getting hit with reality turns on the light in our brain.
We're not always in the wrong, but you almost always have a better shot at changing your mind than changing the external world.
And you don't need to make therapy your identity. If you're getting value from your therapist a couple years from now, keep going. But there's also value in getting what you need, and calling it a day.
In the words of Memphis Bleek on "1-900 Hustler": "Get in, get out, that's an OG classic."
Use your sessions to build specific muscles, and ultimately, you might find that the benefit of putting those muscles to use outweighs the benefits of that weekly, or bi-weekly, therapy payment.
But whether you stay in that setting for the long-term, or the short-term, make the most out of it. And I believe you can do so by being a little more deliberate in what you bring up for discussion, and by bringing some self-awareness and questioning to the front of your mind before your next session.
Good luck with the process.