Walking into my local grocery store in Los Angeles after having spent a significant amount of time traveling in Tibet and Nepal had me stunned.  “SO many aisles,” I thought to myself. “Such bright lights, colors and a plethora of choices.” I felt overwhelmed standing at the entrance of this store.  

My next thoughts went something like this, “Why in the world are there so many choices?  I simply came in here for eggs, milk and butter.”  There were miles of aisles of stuff.

In the milk display, not only could I chose from different brands but also different kinds of milk: regular, 2%, fat free, skim, oat, hemp, almond, goat… I think that you get the point.

Honestly, I found the entire situation to be quite bizarre. Moreover, even beyond feeling bizarre , it actually made me feel quite anxious.  I had too many choices.  What started out as a desire to purchase some simple staple items for my kitchen turned into what felt like a circus side show of food choices.  Should I try this one or that one?  This package is pretty…happy cow on front. This one is $2 more than the container without a happy cow image slapped on front in the glass bottle. I just need milk.

Something has occurred to me regarding an emerging problem in psychotherapy that reminds me of my visit to the grocery store after my traveling.  This problem, I feel, is a reflection of our culture.

For the first time in nearly 30 years, I have people contact me who are still in therapy with someone else and they are casually “just looking for someone new to work with.”  This happens often, it troubles me, and so I am writing about it.

I have found myself needing  to explain to folks  that therapy is actually very hard work.  In fact, it really only begins to work when it starts to become very uncomfortable.  In the past, I believe, this was a given. 

I wondered if it made people anxious to imagine that there is a “better” therapist out there somewhere and that if only they could “swipe left” and find a new one that their feelings of discomfort will go away?

I often ask people if they do the same things when they are in relationship with others?  When things become difficult to they just “swipe left?”  DO they just move on to another choice?

Anything that is worth anything at all will make a significant demand on us. If it doesn’t make a demand, it  probably not worth much in the end. Change, I am sorry to report, requires deep commitment, effort and discomfort at times.

Granted, there can be a reason, a season, or a lifetime to work with any therapist.  Some people come in wanting to address a very specific problem, some people are in a deep cycle of change that lasts for many years and some people use psychotherapy as a kind of deep, deep transformation within the therapeutic relationship.

When therapy starts to “rub you the wrong way” just remember that this is exactly how a pearl is perfected.  It is the irritation of the sand over and over again that creates the pearl.

From a Buddhist perspective, the particular flavor of suffering in this current age revolves around our overwhelming amount of freedom and choices. The internet is an insidious demon contributing to this suffering.  We have a deep insecurity of wanting to be recognized by others, we feel alienated, disconnected despite the “connection” of social media, we are restless and we are overstimulated.  We also believe that changing something on the outside will magically change something on the inside.  This is a fool’s errand.

If you are not feeling progress in your therapy, especially if you are under the age of 40, I might invite you to ask yourself if the difficult feelings and issues that are arising in the therapy mirror your actual day to day life?  Does it mirror your dating life?  Your relationship to work? Your feelings and relationship/lack there of to yourself? Family? Society?

Ending therapy should be a mutual agreement between therapist and client.  After all, aren’t you paying them to see the things that you might not be able or want to see in yourself?

It is often this very thing that we cannot see in ourselves that can be the root cause of much of our suffering. My advice is this- just like any relationship therapy will ask you to lean into your edges of discomfort.  Therapy will ask and often demand that you face what is uncomfortable inside.

While the goal of therapy is to treat what ails the soul- therapy is not supposed to congratulate the ego for its confusion about self and other.  Therapy does not give out awards for “just showing up” for the hour.  If you want the therapy to work, you must do the work.

Marianne Woodman, a now deceased Jungian Analyst, used to tell prospective patients that if they were not willing to work at least an hour a day on their own dreams and interior life, then they were not ready to be in Analysis with her.

 I can’t possibly know for certain, but I am going to guess that it isn’t the world’s fault that you are in the predicament you find yourself in.  Even with all of the choices we have, paradoxically, we still find ourselves feeling dissatisfied, alienated, and confused.

Dig in, dig in even more in your therapy. Try as best as you can to not self edit with your therapist  and you might just find that you are rewarded in ways that you could not have imagined if you just say yes to what arises instead of continuing to swipe left out of the discomfort.