The Benefits of Therapy

I’ve been working with an incredible leadership coach for about a year and a half. She has helped me immensely with how to stop myself from filling up my life with work. Before I started working with her, I was routinely working up until 10pm or 10:30pm at night. I was exhausted and utterly impatient with my husband and children. She helped me learn how to put self-care habits in place but also how to better prioritize what I take on in my work and life, so I have more time and space to focus on those things.    From my work with her, I knew that I also wanted to start therapy. I had several different fits and starts, including working with an Internal Family Systems therapist, which was such an interesting concept and did help me in a profound way.   

It wasn’t clear to me, however, exactly what I was trying to do in therapy. A friend of mine recommended that I try Therapeutic Assessment.

Therapeutic Assessment is a time-bound type of therapy where you go in with a set of questions you are seeking to get answers to. The therapist then selects a battery of tests that align with the questions you are asking. The hope is that going over the results of the assessment together helps you deepen your understanding of yourself and the questions you seek to answer.   

Through my Therapeutic Assessment process, I learned that my experiences as a child were truly traumatic, and that I developed a couple of defense mechanisms to help me cope with the trauma. However, my defense mechanisms can serve to re-traumatize me, which has been happening for the past five years during the crazy start-up phase of both my family and my non-profit organization.   

The ultimate recommendation is that I need about a year of therapy to fully process my childhood trauma and the trauma from the past five years.   

I get the irony of going to therapy to hear that you need therapy, but it was actually a really eye-opening and clarifying process. I see how the coping mechanisms I developed as a child bring both negative and positive things into my life. I see how going deep and fully processing the trauma will help those coping mechanisms function more positively than negatively. I’m excited for the year ahead!