50 Benefits of having a therapist

1. To have someone encourage you to love and accept yourself to the point that you can truly live, without focusing on death and needing to die
2. To have someone in your life that will make it ok to not have to dissociate away from your real life
3. To have someone to bounce ideas on, to problem solve, to explore new behaviors
4. To have someone to talk to about deeply private and personal things
5. To have someone who can genuinely hear your pain, and sit with you when you are hurting
6. To have someone who can give you their undivided attention, their best listening ear, even if for a specified period of time
7. To have someone who gives you courage and hope to keep going, even in the darkest moments
8. To have someone who provides a gentle, safe environment for the healing of your deepest wounds and painful memories
9. To have someone who repeatedly offers positive emotional support and encouragement
10. To have someone who sincerely believes in you and your abilities, talents, and accomplishments
11. To have someone who truly sees you as a good person, a worthwhile person, a valuable person
12. To have someone who will address the variety of issues that underlies the mental health difficulties in your life.
13. To have someone who will build a relationship with you, willingly connecting with you, no matter how badly you feel about yourself
14. To have someone who will challenge your thinking and cognitive distortions
15. To have someone who will connect the dots of your dissociated life experiences
16. To have someone who will encourage you to be comfortable becoming your very own self
17. To have someone who will encourage you to build a life based on your strengths instead of the life your abusers may have designed for you
18. To have someone who will encourage you to try new things and to stretch your horizons
19. To have someone who will expect you to honestly work on your issues instead of blaming others
20. To have someone who will foster your leadership skills, job skill development, educational opportunities, etc.
21. To have someone who will genuinely accept you, warts and all
22. To have someone who will have the courage and ability to tell you “no”
23. To have someone who will hear your heart and the depths of your soul
24. To have someone who will help to remove the jagged edges from your life
25. To have someone who will help you build a tolerance and acceptance of others
26. To have someone who will help you create personal safety, both inside and out
27. To have someone who will help you find and connect with your very best self
28. To have someone who will help you to build the ability to tolerate and sit with intense emotions in yourself and in others
29. To have someone who will help you to contain the extremes of your behavior and feelings
30. To have someone who will help you to emotionally grow, develop, mature
31. To have someone who will help you to move past the blocks, walls, and black holes
32. To have someone who will help you transform self destruction into self acceptance
33. To have someone who will hold you accountable and responsible for troublesome areas
34. To have someone who will hold your secrets with you
35. To have someone who will listen to you, and understand your point of view
36. To have someone who will look for the positive in each and every one of your insiders
37. To have someone who will make it safe enough for you to express your true feelings
38. To have someone who will offer encouragement and support, even when its tough
39. To have someone who will offer guidance as needed
40. To have someone who will offer opportunities to explore trust, acceptance, compassion, kindness, gentleness, patience
41. To have someone who will push you to move forward, instead of sitting complacently
42. To have someone who will recognize family dynamics and their impact on you
43. To have someone who will remember what your insiders say, especially when it is too difficult for you to retain it
44. To have someone who will set appropriate limits and boundaries
45. To have someone who will sit with you while you face your deepest fear, shame, guilt, horror
46. To have someone who will sort out conflict and disagreement
47. To have someone who will stay with you, even when you expose your worst self
48. To have someone who will talk to your inner parts, even the ones you are afraid to speak to or unable to speak to
49. To have someone who will teach and model new behaviors, and healthy emotions
50. To have someone who will team up with you in your healing journey

Did you come up with this list as how it benefitted you or is it from someplace else?

I posted this about 4 years ago. I reading back of all my old post from when I first joined. Unfortunately I never put down a link or where I found it from. So no I did not write this list myself.

Thank you for this. I was just thinking tonight that I think I try to push my T away and am always trying to hate him in order to protect myself. This list is helpful for me to think of my T in a different light.

I think most if not all can be obtained even without a therapist if they are really something that you want.

If a person has those kind of people in their lives . . . Not everyone does, so it can be helpful to have this kind of support. A therapist can be a valuable resource for some.

It just isn't exclusive. I never experienced any of those things with a therapist - I do experience them with real people. But if someone does experience it - fine with me.

Not even these:

4. To have someone to talk to about deeply private and personal things
5. To have someone who can genuinely hear your pain, and sit with you when you are hurting
6. To have someone who can give you their undivided attention, their best listening ear, even if for a specified period of time

I personally can also find all those in normal, everyday relationships. Not from one source/person but from a variety and over time, not all at once. Mentors, colleagues, friends, intimate partners... But I work in the mental health field and many people around me, or new people I met, tend to have interest in these things. I do agree that is someone has no access to such people, a therapist can be a good alternative. My issue though: expecting to find all those things in/with one person is pretty much set to be a futile exercise, IMO at least... easily sets clients up for disappointment and endless longing.

Do you find those things in your therapist(s), OP? Or a good portion of them? If yes, great!

Though I may be able to have some of those traits with some people. I couldn't be all that with just one person.
That's why T is so handy. I don't have to worry about impact on sharing /confiding etc with her as I would if I chose to with friends, which I wouldn't. No friend could meet all that.

Do people feel this about their therapist? About anyone else really? I mean thoroughly believe and feel these factors? I don't associate more than two or three of these factors with another person. Sometimes I wonder what I am doing in therapy at all, or indeed in any kind of relationship.

Particularly not those. I do have these with other people. I did not find a therapist did them.
I am not saying no one can have them with a therapist - I am just saying I did not.

I think I, and perhaps many people who come to therapy, could not obtain them, or didn't know how to obtain them, or thought that therapy was the (only) way to get myself OK enough inside that I could be OK enough in the world, too, so that I could have those kinds of things.

That's the heart of the dilemma. People are unhappy, sometimes desperate, don't know where to turn, don't have the where-with-all they might in another state of mind to make good, thorough decisions. Most of us are social animals who need other people, and need other people to help help us learn how to BE better social animals, so that we can have those kinds of things with others. Where can we find that kind of initial assistance or help? Therapy seems to promise an answer. It's the answer that the medical establishment and society generally has to offer. Only sometimes, for some of us, it ends up keeping us enmeshed, or something, in a dysfunctional system that stymies or even prevents us from looking outside of therapy for those things, or responding to them when they are available.

Goodness, is that a T or a saint...? I've *never* met a T, let alone any other human being, who was all of these.

That perfectly summed up what I think I have been doing. I am going to work on stopping all of that with my T and trust more in his skills and desire to help me.

I really enjoyed that post. As I was reading it, I recognized that my T has most of those qualities and yet, sometimes I try to push him away. It may be because I have trouble believing that I deserve things like that.

I see many of these as reasons to avoid therapy. Seems like the blueprint for crippling dependency and a fantasy-based relationship with a controlling grandiose type. If a therapist wrote this, then it's aggressive love bombing. If I were looking for a therapist, I'd want one who disowns the majority of this.

Years ago i went to a man who had a healing ministry to the InnerChild.

He worked with wounded people.

He actually reached my inner child and talked to "little sue"

I cried alot over there i didnt know why........just hurts i think from young years.

He had so much love and he was trustworthy.

I used to leave there feeling so filled up

It was called Refuge and Restoration ministry.......his name is Bob Gorsline

out of the North Shore Illinois.