Several years ago, a friend gave me a plaque for my newly opened psychotherapy practice. The gift was her witty affirmation of my work. Over the years, I’ve displayed it in various locations, and it never fails to elicit a chuckle.
I love this plaque. Those of us of a certain age probably will probably recall the song and even doing the motions as children. It was a catchy tune and a simple dance—perfect for children. However aside from eliciting childhood memories, my friend’s gift also humorously reflects simple but deep wisdom about psychotherapy and the healing/change process.
You do the hokey-pokey
And you turn yourself around—
That’s what it’s all about.
People usually enter psychotherapy to “turn [their lives] around.” Crises, situational discomfort, chronic dissatisfactions and unhappiness, emotional pain in the form of depression or grief, anxiety, relationship issues—all these cause people to seek help. Further, people seek therapy because the stories they tell themselves about themselves have grown stale and leave little room for meaningful growth. Old coping strategies don’t work anymore.
And so they seek help which manifests in the form of a therapist whose job it is to help clients see and understand the origins of the problem(s), perceive their lives in new ways, and develop new strategies for moving forward in the world.
An important point here: while many clients want and need to solve problems (and therapy facilitate problem-solving), real healing goes well beyond problem-solving. Meaningful healing requires that you reorient yourself—you look in new directions to turn your life around.
Meaningful change and healing is often slow in coming. It takes time to exercise the courage and deeply look at yourself. It takes time to understand of how you got to where you are. It takes time to discern that you can genuinely make other choices for yourself. It takes time to actually implement those choices. And it takes time to feel confident about the choices you’ve made. It bears repeating: meaningful change rarely, if ever, happens overnight. Changing your perceptions, your ways of thinking, old behaviors require mindful practice before they are fully integrated.
Therapy can be pokey, at times.
Most clients, upon seeing the plaque, are amused but don’t stop to reflect upon the fact that the plaque signals the path of healing: a slow, deliberate, careful reorientation and reconciliation with your life that can be helped with a small dose of humor and a wise, compassionate and experienced guide. Healing is both that simple and that complicated.
Indeed, “that’s what it’s all about.”