This week, redditor u/slowlythrough asked, "What was the best thing you ever learned from a therapist?" and people truly came through with some enlightening, thoughtful responses!
So, with that in mind, here are just a few of the most popular pearls of wisdom shared:
1. "How people act is a reflection of them, not me."
2. "A counselor at my university taught me that just because your anxiety tells you something will happen, that doesn't make it true."
"One way to illustrate this is to place a pen on a table, tell yourself you won't be able to pick it up, and then to do it anyway. It feels so weird but also so comforting to know that your thoughts don't have as much influence on your life as they want you to believe. The therapist who told me this was just an intern at the time. I really hope she has been able to help people the same way she did me wherever she is now!"
4. "I can’t control how other people feel. It’s not my job to keep them happy or satisfied. I am allowed to let people be angry or upset."
5. "If you take good thoughts with a grain of salt, why not also take the bad with a grain of salt? Hear it, recognize it, and let it leave."
6. "You have a limited amount of energy and time in any given day, and you get to choose where you place that energy. Like chips at a roulette table."
"Every angry Twitter response, Reddit argument, etc is me putting those chips on those squares. My stack dwindles each time. Angry thoughts about a news article, an opinion I disagree with, that asshole driver on the freeway — all of that takes my energy, my chips. An extremely limited resource.
So, I’m trying to live through that lens and make the best possible decisions with my stack. That asshole driver gets none of my chips anymore. YA CAN'T HAVE EM FUCKFACE. I was about to have a negative interaction online with someone today, so I got up and pet the ever-loving shit out of my cat instead. Like, world-class scratches, he was stoked.
Chips. Place them wisely."
8. "My worth is not determined by my productivity. Being raised by a workaholic Marine and then having a series of nightmare bosses led me to have a severe guilt spiral if I spent a most of day not 'doing' something."
9. "Overworking is a form of self-harm."
10. "To not make permanent decisions whilst in a highly emotional state."
11. "'No.' Is a complete sentence."
12. "My therapist once told me not to think about a Pink Elephant. I didn’t know what she meant at the time, but she gave me a few moments to think. I was trying not to think about a pink elephant, but it’s all I could think about because she told me not to think about it."
"After the time was up, she asked me what I was thinking about. I told her I was thinking about a pink elephant. She told me that the more you try not to think about something and push it to the back of your mind, the more you tend to think about it. This is why my thoughts were consuming me and I was having awful flashbacks. Thanks to her, I have been able to manage my PTSD, depression, and anxiety. She was lovely."
13. "To be okay with others not being okay."
14. "There are only two things in life I have to do — 1: I have to die one day. 2: Whatever I decide to do, I have to live with the consequences. The rest is completely up to me."
"I had problems with perfectionism and burnout, and eventually everything stressed me out because I had the feeling that I had to do things for my job and for my family and I felt trapped in it all the time and I completely lost myself. So this changed a lot for me.
I don't have to be productive all day, but I can decide to be. I don't have to do the dishes, for example. The consequence is that I'll come into a dirty kitchen the next morning and I hate that. So instead of having do to it (and feeling overwhelmed by 'all the work I have to do'), I decide that I want to do it. Change the wording. It doesn't sound like much but it changed everything for me."
15. "If you're anxious around crowds, try to observe instead of walking through your mind how you might look, how to act, how to be funny, what they think about you, etc. This technique of not turning into myself, but actively trying to just observe made me not only a better listener, but much less awkward, too."
16. "I can't fix something I can't face. My therapist compared it to a garishly painted room in your home. If you can't face the fact that it has terrible decor, then you'll just shut the door and keep avoiding it — but every time you walk by the closed door, it causes tension and anxiety."
"You've got to open the door and assess what's wrong, truly and honestly face it, then plan how to fix it (re: paint). It's the only way. If you blindly enter and frantically throw whitewash over it, it'll just make it worse."
17. "People lie with their words, not their actions."
18. "My therapist said that not everything is either 'good' or 'bad,' but there are a lot of things that are just neutral. For example, saying 'no' to a person’s request is not bad, it’s just neutral. It’s probably pretty obvious, but it wasn’t for me. I was so used to seeing everything in black and white that I had never even considered this."
19. "Just because you knew someone who had it worse than you doesn't mean your situation wasn't abuse as well. As a non-combat veteran myself I had to learn that just because I wasn't getting shot at didn't mean I don't deserve VA assistance for the PTSD caused by my military role."
20. "Not my therapist, but my father was a clinical psychologist for about 35 years, and he said: 'Never ascribe rational behavior or thought to a fundamentally irrational person.'"
"My mother-in-law had extensive mental health problems and several self-destructive tendencies as a result. You can’t reason her into good behavior because she didn’t reason herself out of it."
21. "When talking about my trauma and how I still felt so haunted by it, my therapist told me, 'You don't have to move on, but you have to find a way to move forward.'"
22. "That helping others is a way of avoiding helping myself."
23. "People aren't always looking at and thinking about you if you're in public. If you enter a room full of people and they all turn to look at you, it's just a knee-jerk reaction to the movement/noise, they literally won't even think about you past, 'This person just entered the room.' It helped so much with social anxiety."
24. "How I acted as a teenager doesn't define who I am as an adult."
25. "'The only way out is through.' I spent years trying to move past my trauma and negative thinking by pushing it down and trying to be positive in its place, but, by doing so, I was invalidating it to myself. The only way I was ever able to heal from it was to accept that it happened and allow myself to grieve and feel that pain."
26. "Holding grudges and being unforgiving hurts you more than the other person. You can’t experience other people's feelings, so whatever you’re going through in terms of hate or your inability to forgive someone else is purely your own feelings and burden."
"Forgiving doesn’t mean you’ll be best friends with someone, it means you’ll create the right space and mindset to make peace with stuff that used to weigh you down. Tension is harmful."
27. "My mum was a terrible person, and my therapist told me I 'didn't need to treat her as if she was a loving mother.' I was doing all the things a good daughter does for a mother that loves them; however, I didn't have a mother that treated me as though she loved me. It was life changing to realize this, and really helped me stop being abused by her."
28. "Just because you think a thought, it doesn't mean that thought controls your destiny or defines who you are. Our minds come up with some really weird shit, and that's okay. They're just thoughts. How we choose to feel or act is what really counts."
29. "If something goes wrong, it doesn't always have to be somebody's fault."
30. "That I 'need to update my narrative.' I was holding onto things that I believed to be true in my early 20's that just don’t apply in my early 30's."
"For example 'I don’t like going on dates, I’m really bad at them. I can only date people I’ve been friends with.' No! In my early 20's, I had NO work, travel, or life experience, so I found dates scary. Dates aren't that bad, and I actually enjoy them now. All that fear was getting in the way of chemistry — you can like a new person without being friends first!"
31. "If you spend time stressing or worrying about something that might happen before it happens, you're putting yourself through it twice. If the worst case scenario does happen, then experiencing it once is enough."
32. "We judge others based on their actions, but we judge ourselves based on our intentions."
33. And finally: "How people treat you is THEIR karma. How YOU respond is your karma."
You've read their responses, but now it's YOUR turn! What's the best thing you ever learned in therapy? Share in the comments below!
Some entries were edited for length and/or clarity. H/T: Reddit.