Is therapy worth it? An hour to look closely at your own statue

Yes, therapy is worth it, and not only for people who have hit rock bottom. Whoever writes here isn’t a psychologist, so this is the view from outside the therapist’s office. And from out here you can see a benefit few people put into words: therapy is one of the rare moments when you stop rushing and look at yourself closely, noticing details that slip by the rest of the week.

A quick note before we go on: nothing here replaces a conversation with a professional. If you’re going through a hard time, please reach out for help. In the US, you can call or text 988 at any hour; elsewhere, your local crisis line can point you in the right direction.

How do we usually see ourselves?

Think about a statue in a square you walk past every day. You know it’s there, maybe you even know who it honors. But if someone asked you to describe its face, its hands or what’s carved on the base, you probably couldn’t, because you always walk past it in a hurry.

Now imagine the same statue in a museum. There we slow down, step closer, notice the texture of the stone, the vein on the back of the hand, the shoulder that came out a little crooked. The statue is the same; what changes is the attention we give it.

With ourselves, life is usually the square. Between work, bills, messages and appointments, we rush past ourselves every single day. The way we react when someone disagrees, that old hurt that quietly changes the subject, the real reason we always drop a project halfway through. Those details are there all along, we just rarely stop long enough to notice them.

Does everyone have a blind spot?

Yes, and it has nothing to do with intelligence. In the 1950s, two American psychologists drew up the Johari window, a simple way of sorting what we know about ourselves. One of its panes is the “blind spot”: things other people notice in you that you can’t see yourself.

Decades later, researcher Simine Vazire put numbers on it.¹ She compared what people said about themselves with what friends and strangers said about them. The result is intriguing. For inner traits like anxiety, people know themselves best. But for traits that are visible from the outside and touch our vanity, like intelligence and creativity, others are often more accurate than we are.

In other words, some details of our own statue are simply invisible when we’re alone, in a hurry and standing too close.

So what does therapy actually do?

From the outside, here’s what you can see: therapy is an hour set aside to stand in front of your own statue and look closely, next to someone trained to notice details. They won’t tell you what to do with your life, but they will point out something you never noticed and ask, “have you ever seen this?”

There’s also an effect that sounds small and isn’t. In a study at the University of California, researchers showed volunteers in a brain scanner photos of faces with strong expressions like anger and fear.² When people named the emotion they were seeing, the amygdala, the part of the brain that works like an alarm, calmed down. Putting it into words turns the volume down. In therapy, you do that with your own emotions, one session at a time.

Does therapy actually work?

It does, and science has been measuring it for a long time. One of the first big reviews on the subject, back in 1977, pooled hundreds of studies and found that the average person in therapy ended up better off than about 75% of people who weren’t.³

But from the outside, what stands out most is the exercise that happens in there: getting to know yourself. During the week, the mind stores everything in a jumble, like a drawer we keep stuffing things into in a hurry. A difficult conversation, a frustration at work, a fear that doesn’t even have a name yet. In a session, you take everything out of the drawer, look at it piece by piece and put each thing where it belongs.

When you understand where a reaction comes from, it has less power over you. That irritation that seemed to come out of nowhere gets an origin, and what has an origin can be taken care of. It’s a precious and rare exercise, because almost nothing in our routine asks us to stop and sort out what’s going on inside.

Why does it sometimes feel uncomfortable?

Because sculpting chips stone. The story goes that when people asked Michelangelo how he made David, he said the statue was already inside the marble and all he did was remove what didn’t belong. It may be a legend, but the idea is beautiful and fits here. In therapy you stay you, and the work is slowly chipping away the excess that hides who’s already there.

And chipping away takes effort. Some sessions leave you lighter, and some leave you shaken, thinking about it all week. That’s usually a sign that a chip came loose.

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. Maybe he overstated it a bit, but the good part holds: we live better when, every now and then, we stop and look at ourselves closely.

So here’s a question to take with you. If you stopped in front of your own statue today, with no rush, what detail do you think you’d see for the first time?

To keep looking at yourself closely, here are three more reads:

• If your mind keeps building scenarios that never happen, here’s why anxiety creates problems that don’t exist.
• When nothing seems to make sense, it helps to understand why everything feels meaningless.
• And if the rush comes from feeling that everyone else has already made it, we talked about the feeling of being behind in life.

Editor’s note: Everyone has that friend who swears they don’t need therapy because they handle everything on their own. And they do, by venting to you every Friday for three hours straight. Send them this article. Maybe it’s time they shared the load with a professional.

Footnotes

1. Vazire, S. (2010). Who knows what about a person? The self-other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2), 281-300. ↩ source

2. Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H. & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428. ↩ source

3. Smith, M. L. & Glass, G. V. (1977). Meta-analysis of psychotherapy outcome studies. American Psychologist, 32(9), 752-760. ↩ source