Five fascinating things I learned while working as a therapist

Your perspective dictates your experience. This is how to choose a positive POV

You can listen to the first two parts of this post on TikTok (Part I, Part II), YouTube (Part I, Part II) and Instagram (Part I, Part II).

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Here are five fascinating things I learned from working as a therapist for just over a decade, which is an experience I feel extremely grateful for because it taught me so much about people, and human resilience, and what really matters in life.

1. People really can change

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

– Anaïs Nin, French-born novelist and essayist

If you type “People don’t…” into Google, its first guess for the completion of your sentence will be “… change.” The world seems to want us to believe that people don't change, but the idea is quite ludicrous. If people didn’t change, then we’d all still be running around in our Spiderman jumpsuits trying to deface our little sister’s My Little Ponies (just me? Definitely not just me).

Of course we change. We’re changing every moment of every day. Our brains literally, physically change to accommodate new information. They reshape themselves to make frequently thought ideas more efficient in the future. So, if you choose to think something like “life is brilliant” every morning, before long your brain will get really quite good at thinking about life's brilliance. Repeat the thought "life sucks" and you'll probably notice the opposite effect. Our brains were made for learning because that's how to survive. Our cells regenerate, our values reorganise themselves, and we make (and break) habits all the time. Change is what we do.

But there's a little part of us that doesn't want to believe this because it's busy maintaining the illusion of a consistent self. And because of that part, it can be really important to remind yourself that you are changing all the time – that you aren't the same person you were ten years ago, and you're not the person you'll be in ten years, either. 

So, if there’s something that you think you’re stuck with, then fear not. You probably aren’t. It’s just a matter of training your brain to believe otherwise.

2. We are beings that think, not beings that are thought

Contrary to how it can seem, happy people are not happy because they just don’t have negative thoughts. Their secret is knowing that those thoughts are not reality, that they don’t have any real power. The simple fact of the matter is this: you cannot stop a negative thought from occurring to you, but whether or not you entertain it is entirely up to you. 

When I was working as a therapist, if a client was struggling with catastrophic visions of the future or an inner critic that spun torturous stories about their lack of worth, our sessions would likely involve some work for claiming control over the more problematic patterns. And you can do this too. 

It starts with awareness. The knowledge that we’re thinking a thought – that we made it and therefore it's not being forced upon us by some external monster truth – already de-potentiates it. After that, we can play with it – quite literally – to further deny its impact.

Human beings are programmed to learn through play. We’ve been growing this way ever since our very first Spidey-suits. And some of the easiest and most effective hacks for mental (and physical) health utilise this fact. We can use play in order to change our minds, literally. Here are two of these tools for you to have some fun with:

A tool for robbing your inner critic of its power

If you do your negative thinking in an internal voice, you can adjust its pitch or quality to change the emotion it evokes. I know this sounds too silly to make a meaningful difference, but honestly, it does. Everything we do routinely has a pattern to it, and that includes the way we think our thoughts. So, you may not have thought about it, but your inner critic has a certain style of speech or type of voice and if you mess with that, your brain will find it harder to complete its usual pattern and take you to anxiety-ville (or wherever it is you usually end up).

Step 1: Think of something your inner critic often says and make a mental note of the exact words that come to mind. 

Step 2: On a scale of 0-10 (10 being very uncomfortable), how uncomfortable would you say those words feel when you imagine them being spoken?

Step 3: Answer these questions about the voice in its natural state:

• Is this your voice or someone else's?

• Does it sound high- or low-pitched?

• Do you hear it more on the right or left of your head (or coming from elsewhere)?

• Does it speak quickly or slowly?

• Is it loud or quiet? 

• Does it have any other qualities?

Step 4: Pick one of the above qualities, change it to its opposite, and then imagine the voice speaking the same words in the new way. For example, you can make it sound high and squeaky like Mickey Mouse, or low and slow as if the tape recorder's running out of batteries. 

Step 5: For each change, rate the discomfort out of ten again, noting the changes that make the biggest difference. 

Step 6: Finally, remember the combination that felt the least uncomfortable, and use this voice the next time your inner critic tries to take hold. 

A tool for taking the intensity out of distressing mental images

If you do your negative thinking visually — if you tend to see yourself failing in some way, or picture something scary or off-putting just at the worst moment — try this: notice your mental image, along with how it makes you feel. Then, imagine you can turn it into an old, black-and- white photograph, so that it feels less current, less real. Finally, ask yourself how that changes the emotion it evokes. 

Or, if that doesn't make a difference, you can change your image in any number of ways:  make it brighter, lighter, darker, fuzzy, blurry, grainy. In fact, try all these things out, taking note of any that make a positive difference, and then combine them into a kind of mental recipe or the ingredients of a magic spell, which you can use any time an image bothers you.

For example, let's say you find that when you make a distressing image slightly blurry, sepia coloured, and small, it feels better. If so, the next time you can't sleep because the image of that embarrassing thing you did earlier keeps popping into your mind, then you can take a few moments to turn that image to sepia, before blurring it and then shrinking it, to tell your mind – using powerful symbolic language – that it's okay to let that thought go.

Step 1: Call to mind an example of an uncomfortable mental image to practise with and just observe it for a moment

Step 2: On a scale of 0-10 (10 being very uncomfortable), how uncomfortable would you say that image feels when you pay attention to it right now?

Step 3: Answer these questions about the image as you initially imagine it:

• Is this image in colour or black-and-white?

• If in colour, are the colours brightly saturated or muted?

• Is the image large or small in your mind?

• Does it feel close (as if it's right in front of your nose), or distant (as if it’s on the other side of the room)?

• Is it in sharp focus or blurry?

• Does it have any other qualities?

Step 4: Pick one of the above qualities, change it to its opposite (colour saturation and distance are often effective), and then spend a moment observing the image in this new way. 

Step 5: For each change you try, rate the discomfort out of ten again, and note the changes that make the biggest difference. 

Step 6: Finally, remember the combination that made the biggest positive difference, because you can use this as a kind of mental magic spell. 

I use this tool often, and to really seal the deal, I usually finish by either imagining the image drifting really far away, or mentally throwing it in the bin. Full disclosure: it does sometimes come back, in which case I repeat the process until it doesn't. 

These things aren’t magic tricks. They’re just ways of making meaningful suggestions for your unconscious mind to hear. And the best thing about this? The more often you practise letting go or reducing the intensity of unhelpful thoughts, the less they'll occur to you in the future.

3. Everyone is doing their best

Perhaps the most wonderful gift that a therapy practice teaches is tolerance. But “tolerance” isn’t really the right word. What I mean here, no matter how cheesy it might sound, is love. As a therapist, you need to be able to love your clients – not in a seggsy way, of course, and not in a friendly way, either. This is a different kind of love, but it's essential. If you can't practise from a place of love, the work is unlikely to land. 

When I first learned this, I thought it would be really difficult to feel love for every client, but what I found was that, rather than being a challenge to access, this therapeutic love is kinda unavoidable. Hearing people’s stories — what they’ve been through that has led to their decisions; the fear, shame and self-loathing we all battle with in our own way — means that you can more easily start to see past the errors and the questionable acts. It’s not that we start to feel OK about people doing bad things. It’s that we can know that they haven’t done those things because they’re fundamentally evil, but because they’re struggling.

The reason this is so powerful is that it means we can start to let go of the resentful drive to “get people back” when they mistreat us in some way, which just doesn't work. Clarissa Pinkola Estés talks about how her Aunt Edna – who sounds like an absolute legend – used to say that holding a grudge was like drinking a mug of poison, and then hoping the other person will fall down dead. And it's so true. Resentment and anger just eat us up from the inside out, they use our energy and our time, they monopolise our thoughts and block creativity without affecting the other person at all, and here's the thing: even if they did, it wouldn't solve the original problem. Someone else's pain will never take your pain away – even if that someone else is someone who has hurt you. Getting even is a flawed strategy for feeling better about ourselves. It’s far more effective to choose acceptance.

This is because:

Acceptance of the Other = Acceptance of the Self

Acceptance of the Self = Acceptance of the Other

I believe it really is that simple. Learn to operate from a place of love, and you'll experience less conflict both inside and out. This is not to say that it’s easy, necessarily, but then again, the things really worth doing in life rarely are.

4. Every emotion is wonderful (and useful)

We often talk about "letting go" of anger, or regret, or shame. And when people visit a therapist because they struggle with “negative” emotions like these, they’ll usually want to “get rid” of the feeling. But, as psychologist Susan David so eloquently puts it, to wish for this is to have “dead people’s goals.”

“Only dead people never get unwanted or inconvenienced by their feelings. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.”

— Susan David, The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage

I battled with fear for a very long time. So much so that my body started to break down — I burned out from the exertion of a chronic state of fight-or-flight because I was so determined not to experience my “negative emotions.” Ultimately, that crash forced me to come to terms with my resisted emotions, and doing so meant that I was able to see them differently. I had to learn that accepting discomfort is not the same as dwelling on it. It turns out that when you allow the experience of emotional pain, it sooner or later transforms into something else. If you don't, then it won't change, or at least not for the better.

This, of course, is not to say that it's easy. But if we can learn to live by the rule that pain does not happen to us but for us, and if we choose to start actively noticing and acknowledging how we feel a little more often, then, gradually and over time, our feelings can start to flow more easily. 

Then, you can take it to another level when you feel affected by a negative emotion, by remembering to ask yourself: what is this feeling here to teach me? That simple question – what is this feeling here to teach me? – can be beyond empowering. It means that you can make meaning out of misfortune, rather than feeling like the hapless target for terrible luck. It can help you to remember and feel grateful for the love that came before grief, the purpose that sits below the rumble of anger and, sometimes, the most powerful thing of all: the motivation to stand up and do something differently. 

5. Every day can be a good day

OK, obviously that is hyperbole. I don't mean it, really. We’re all going to have crappy days. But maybe we could have fewer if we lived by the rules I've shared in this little list more often:

1. People really can change

2. We are beings that think, not beings that are thought

3. Everyone is doing their best

4. Every emotion is wonderful (and useful)

5. Every day can be a good day

What we get is this:

At any moment, on any day, we always have a choice in how we perceive our current situation and how we react to it. We can't control everything that happens to us, obviously, but we can always control how we respond to it.

So, do we opt to feel victimised by the thoughts in our mind, the feelings in our body or rubbish things that go on in the world? Or, do we choose something different? 

A client of mine returned from a yoga retreat once, beaming because of something a Buddhist monk had told her. He had simply said that “happiness is a practice.” And while I wouldn't agree that happiness is quite the right word, I do believe that we can create a feeling of general contentment and okayness, as well as more ease and connection by waking up in the morning each day and deciding to face, accept and work with whatever the day brings.

Bearing in mind that I'm not expecting you to do all, or even any of these things (they're just idea-starters), try these questions on for size and see what comes up: 

• If you could choose your perspective on life or on other people, what kind of perspective would you pick for today?

• If you could make one small change to your behaviour today, what would that be?  

• Which relationships in your life could be improved if you chose to see the good in others?  

• If you've been experiencing any challenging emotions lately: What do those feelings have to teach you?

We have so much more control over our experience that we tend to believe. I say let's start using it. A final note: If you had an answer to any of those questions, but then a little voice piped up to say, “Yes, but I can’t do that because…”, then you can thank Mickey for his input, but kindly remind him that he can’t tell you how to live your life.

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Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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