People imagine that it’s difficult to become a psycho therapist.

This is true. Schools have limited spaces. The work can be at times challenging and painful. The worst part of becoming a therapist is therapy school. The people there are terrible.

They say that many personal trainers have eating disorders and problems with how they look.

Therapists?

Or the people who go to and are attrected to to therapy school?

They are all batshit crazy. I have yet to meet one who’s not either totally neurotic at best or an absolute shit pile of a human at worst.

Me?

What the hell was I doing there for four years?

Playing along.

Complicit.

Totally neurotically so.

Now that I have some perspective on the matter I have determined that mental health care comes down to one simple joke:

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this…

Doctor: Then don’t do that anymore.

That’s it.

That’s essentially what a therapist does.

We help people understand how they’re hurting themselves, then advise them not to do that anymore.

The ‘this’ in question could be holding back all emotion, exploding with emotion, having terrible boundaries, boozing it up, philandering - you get the idea.

The first task, is to help a client understand the first part of the joke:

It hurts when I do this

Frequently we get so stuck in our shitty patterns that we forget the part where it hurts. Without knowing that, there’s not a chance in the world that change could happen.

Once you fully experience the part where ‘it hurts’ the ‘don’t do that anymore part’ eventually takes care of itself.

Imagine this. When you say: It hurts when I do this, the ‘this’ in question is poking yourself in both of your eyes with spoons.

Instead of respoinding with ‘don’t do that anymore’, we took the opposite approach. What if the response was ‘do it more’?

You’d potentially keep poking yourself in the eyes. Eventually your eyes would start bleeding. They would likely stop working. Over time, you’d stab them so much that you wore out the nerves such that you couldn’t feel anymore. Then you could wander through life, bumping into things with two silver spoons protruding from the sockets where your eyes used to be.

Fun.

And how likely?

It’s more than likely that you’d eventually begin to feel the pain of your behaviour. Eventually you’d stop.

Or?

Perhaps we would find room for you on one of those tee vee shows where they bring on damaged and hurt people to display their ugly for the world to scorn.

In the end, pain is a hell of a teacher.