Is Therapy About Becoming "Normal"?

A parking pass sitting on a therapist's couch, saying, "I dunno, doc, I guess I'm just always waiting for someone else to validate me." Image source.

Trying to organize my thoughts about what exactly therapy *is*.

For most of my life, I have conceptualized therapy like this: The purpose of therapy is to become normal. There are 2 types of people in the world: normal people and messed-up people. Very binary. If you find that your emotional difficulties are so bad that you start to think "maybe it's because I'm one of the messed-up people," you should get yourself to therapy real quick and get yourself fixed, to be normal. Better do it right away, before anyone notices that you're a messed-up person- because messed-up people deserve to be mocked by normal people.

(Don't take this as me being mean and judging other people- I'm talking about this because it's how I saw myself, when I was in middle school going to therapy for the first time.)

Basically, it was the idea that the world is fine just the way it is, and you should be fine with it. If you are having emotional difficulties with the state of the world, that's a *you* problem, and you need to get yourself straightened out behind closed doors so that your weirdness doesn't bother any normal people.

Sometimes I would hear people say "I used to have [some really bad psychological issue which was interfering with life]. But then I went to therapy, and now, well, I still [kind of have this problem to a lesser extent], it's not totally gone, but now it's manageable because I have learned how to [whatever they learned in therapy]." I interpreted this to mean that the goal of the therapy was that they would "become normal," ie, not have that problem at all any more, but that the therapy was only partly successful- perhaps because whatever variety of "messed-up" they are is incurable, perhaps because they didn't work hard enough in therapy to "get over it." I took it to mean that, even though the therapy didn't totally "work," they are trying to put a positive spin on it- at least they are able to handle life better than they used to, even though they're still not a "normal person."

And also, I thought therapists had inscrutable methods that clients weren't really supposed to understand- you just trust the therapist and go along with whatever they want you to do. I thought that if I knew the "big picture," if I knew the "strategy" that the therapist was using to address my issues, that would sort of "spoil" it. Like it wouldn't work if I had an understanding of the overall plan- I should simply experience it in the moment as it happens to me. 

These are the assumptions I had about what therapy is, what the purpose is- nobody ever really explicitly spelled it out like this, but that's what I thought it was.

But now I think, maybe it's more like this: There aren't "normal people" and "messed-up people." Everyone has difficulties in their life, everyone has feelings, everyone has healthy or unhealthy ways they deal with their problems and feelings. It's a spectrum, not a binary. And there could be a large variety of reasons why you might have more difficulty with something that other people do- related to your personality, experiences you've had in the past, etc- none of that means you're a "messed-up" person and you should be embarrassed- it just means that's how your own specific circumstances happened to overlap. For other people, they overlap differently. 

And therapy is about learning tools and strategies to be more emotionally healthy. Maybe other people- "normal" people- don't seem to need that, because the strategies they already have are working okay for their circumstances- but if you need more help, there's nothing wrong with that. 

It's not about becoming a "normal person." It's not about trying to get you back to this baseline of being like everybody else- NO ONE is like everyone else. It's about taking where you are as a starting point and working from there. What would be helpful to you, where you are right now? The goal is not to have the same emotional response as a "normal person" would. The goal is to manage your emotions such that you're able to live your life in a healthy way. What that looks like for you could be very different from how it looks for other people.

It's not about getting all your weirdnesses "fixed" behind closed doors so nobody ever realizes you're not "normal." It's about learning how to live in a reasonable and healthy way while still being a person who has/ had/ is susceptible to those "weirdnesses." (Because *everybody* has "weirdnesses" like that to some extent.) Maybe that means you avoid certain situations. Maybe it's about how you communicate your feelings and needs to other people. Maybe it's about being aware of your thought patterns. Etc. 

The way I see it now is, you are in charge of your own life, your own body, your own health. Therapy can be a useful tool to help you move your life in the direction that you want to go. It's not the therapist being in charge of you and telling you what to do and what's right for your life- it's you making the decisions, deciding what your own goals are, and choosing to use the therapist's services if you feel that would be helpful.

And about diagnoses- I don't think there's an "absolute truth" about whether you "have" or "don't have" various psychological conditions. Life is full of raw data, the experiences and feelings we have every day, and there's not one "correct" way to summarize that raw data into a useful model of how your brain works. But it can be helpful to put labels on this, in order to understand and communicate your feelings better, and to find useful information about what strategies have been helpful for other people. I'm thinking of labels like "autism" or "depression," based on my own experiences- but this idea that there's not an "absolute truth" and you are allowed to use a label if it's helpful for you, comes from my experiences in the queer community.

As for whether I should know the big picture, or if I'm just a helpless person that therapy happens to- well, if I see a therapist again in the future, I would definitely talk to them about their overall strategy. I want to understand how it's supposed to work, what the therapist thinks the goal is, etc. 

What do they teach in therapist school? I want to know.

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