Therapy isn’t about making the counsellor laugh

Let’s talk about the agony that people pleasers such as myself inflict on themselves by trying to make therapists like them.

Oh dear I’ve said I’d start a new Substack and people are now subscribing to it so I may as well get my bottom in gear and write something.

Let’s start with the juicy nugget of mental health, eh?

Full disclosure: I am generally pretty lucky with my mental health so far in life. Garden-variety stress and anxiety are my mental health bedfellows from time to time, so please don’t take anything I write about mental health the wrong way if you think I am being glib or dismissive of therapy or mental wellness. I have a great deal of time for mental health discussion and its complexities and the challenges people have in accessing real-world support.

Fuller disclosure: I have changed the names of my therapists but everything else really did happen.

And exhale.

Therapy is something I do not consider taboo. Everyone should try it. It doesn’t work for everyone and your chemistry with a therapist isn’t going to hit a bullseye each time, far from it. But it is my belief everyone should try it at least once.

I have ‘been in therapy’ three times in my life. This sounds far more glamorous than it really is, like I’ve been pinned down onto a brown leather daybed in a mahogany panelled room with a beaky gentleman in a tailored wool suit smoking a pipe asking me about my father (my dad is lovely, by the way).

It was of great personal disappointment to me when I discovered there is no lying down involved in therapy in the 21st century.  There is a lot of silence, however. And that will never do.

My first time in therapy was about six or seven years ago. That series ended after four or five months and the therapist – a wonderful woman named Alice who remains my favourite therapist of the three I have seen – would seat me on a comfortable sofa in an attic office in a part of town where it was extremely difficult to find a parking space. My second therapist, Bonnie, saw me in the cramped downstairs office of a semi-detached suburban home, but it had a very comfortable waiting area, I recall, with facilities for making hot drinks and a fancy electric fire. And my most recent therapist, Colin, was a disembodied head on Zoom, because lockdown gifted us all a life on Zoom for about a year and that was all completely fine and normal at the time.

So I found myself in various comfortable seats drinking hot drinks and talking about myself to somebody whose job is to let me just talk and talk and talk. I’ve come out of each series understanding the benefits of therapy but I have gone into each new course deliberately trying to undermine it by being far too self-aware.

Therapy is supposed to be a place you can be authentic and unguarded, where you should be honest with yourself, maybe not right away but certainly after a few trust-building introductory sessions after you’ve both figured one another out and they’ve worked out your bullshit. Therapy does not work if you are putting on an act and in any case (and I cannot stress this enough) they know you are doing this anyway. Who are you kidding? These are therapists!

A good therapist will eventually call you out on your nonsense and use their tools and exercises to try and get you to shake it off and use your time usefully. A less good therapist will call you out on your nonsense but not really help save you from yourself.

My problem is, I go into a therapy session with my willingness to be a good student written all over my face in black marker pen.

I don’t want them to feel sorry for me or to think that I actually need therapy. How preposterous. ME? So I go into therapy and I cheerfully talk myself out of it. For an hour.

I like to learn about my therapists and the more I learn about them, the more evidence I have to support the fact I really don’t want to make their days any harder. Alice had young children and was also a magistrate, Bonnie was in the middle of a divorce and also had young children, and Colin was gay and black and my sessions with him were in summer 2020, the roaring crest of the Black Lives Matter wave of protests and activism, so I was acutely aware of my straight, cis, white woman privilege in our sessions.

I go into a therapist’s office desperate for them to like me. DESPERATE. I do not want to look like a princess or for them to think I’m wasting their time.

What I want is a therapist to come away from our hour together feeling like their training and expertise has helped me in some way. I want them to feel good about themselves and to go away thinking, ‘Rose is great. I wish all my clients were like her.’

Now I am writing this down, I sound utterly insane.

There have been two moments, however, when my therapists have called me out on my approval-seeking nonsense and stopped me in my tracks.

Being pregnant in lockdown was a bit of a strange time and I contacted a counselling service to help me through that particular episode of anxiety so as not to lay too much at the feet of my partner at a time when we were both living on top of one another in mandated isolation. The counsellor on the end of the line this time would be Colin.

Colin said at the end of our 10-week course that as a gay man, he was unlikely to experience pregnancy himself (this made me laugh but then I realised he was being serious and I stopped - again, this is me being an idiot and I mean no disrespect to trans men who give birth at all). Colin told me our sessions were his first ever true understanding of how mind-boggling and terrifying pregnancy is so I was gratified that our ten weeks together were a journey for both of us in some way.

Before I reveal how he caught me out, I will first share this nice exchange between us from our final session.

At the beginning of our course, I was getting a lot of intrusive thoughts and nightmares. I was watching a lot of cooking shows at the time and my subconscious would ambush my head with images of foetuses cooked sous-vide. At the time, these intrusive thoughts were genuinely quite upsetting but by the end of the course I was able to compartmentalise them and not allow them to bother me, before they stopped happening altogether. Colin, in his summary of the progress we had made during my ten-week course raised these intrusive thoughts again.

“You worked through your intrusive thoughts about dead unborn babies.”

“Yes. The sous-vide foetuses.”

“Yes. And how did we resolve those intrusive thoughts?”

“By accepting that I have an overactive imagination and I was watching a lot of Masterchef at the time.”

With this solemn reply, Colin coughed, and then that cough yielded to proper laughter and he was forced to break character to steady himself again for the duration of the call. Because I delight in making other people laugh and had luckily worked through my pregnancy anxiety with Colin’s help, I was ecstatic I had amused him. There is nothing more pleasing than making a stony-faced therapist laugh. Even more so when they get the giggles and cannot control their mirth for many minutes after the initial punchline has dropped.

But it was in a session midway through our course that Colin made a comment that caused me to break character.

He asked me: “Rose, why do you curate our sessions like this?”

I don’t know if I provided a real answer or skirted around the question. Probably the latter. Colin was not a question-asking counsellor. I know now that I was trying to make him like me, trying to make him feel like his counselling was really working and that he was doing a great job. Because I was focusing so much on how he perceived me as a client, I wasn’t being as honest as I could. And the only person who would lose out in those ten hours of counselling would be me.

Alice interrupted my monologue once by throwing a basket of ornaments onto the carpet and asked me to pick an ornament to represent each member of my immediate family and myself. I obediently did so, selecting allegorical effigies I believed suitable.

I remember it so clearly. A piece of volcanic rock for my wonderfully wild mum, a boat for my sailing enthusiast father, a colourful geode for my cerebral youngest brother, a twee puppy for my other brother because I wanted to pick something completely unsuitable for him for my own entertainment, and a duck for me – again because I thought the duck ornament was a bit silly and I wanted Alice to think I was funny. I picked them quickly, not wanting Alice to think I was overthinking or trying to manipulate the exercise.

I talked her through my selection, amused by my own narrative for the exercise, and then came to the duck. “… And yeah, the duck is for me. I’m just swimming along watching my crazy family and their antics quacking away and getting on with it,” I said, pleased. Awaiting a pat on the head, I think.

“You picked the duck because you’re swimming along doing your thing but under the surface you’re in a frenzy, kicking and kicking and kicking,” Alice said, looking at me with a very serious expression.

Chandler Bing voice: Could I BE any more psychology 101?

Completely unguarded, my face prickled and reddened. That comment was the arrow that found the chink in the armour. I think my jaw was on the floor. My sessions thereafter were much more productive. I’m not sure if it was the on-the-nose remark, or the fact that I’d walked into such a cliché that broke me more. The waterbird metaphor? Really?

So therapy is a big deal for people pleasers like me. In my case, I seek it out because I am a mental wellness advocate and I know that I have benefited from therapy in the past, but my tendency to seek approval has sometimes manifested itself as self-sabotage in these sessions. Will I have therapy again? We live long lives, all being well, so the chances are high. Will I go in with my performative, approval-seeking bullsh**? Maybe, but perhaps knowing this is what I do and how shocking it feels to be found out - how tiny and silly you feel when the counsellor peeks behind your mask and says ‘Ha! Found you!’ - maybe I’ll try harder to be authentic.