9 unexpected benefits of psychotherapy

A lot of people tell you a lot of different things about the benefits of psychotherapy. And it is exactly the people who have least experience with it who will tell you the most reasons why it does not work.

1. Benefits of psychotherapy: Better Romantic Relationships

It seems like a universal rule: the people who deserve each other always find each other. That can lead to great relationships but also to very troublesome ones.

A young woman who was raised by an alcoholic father magically encounters a man with addiction issues and marries him. That’s not the script of a Disney movie—it was my mother’s life plot: on some level, she probably knew that her future husband was trouble and that in spite of his constant efforts to break with the booze, he would never change. But consciously she thought she would be able to make him “a better man.”

Attraction isn’t a choice—I get it. The very character traits in a man that would have scared off most women, she actually found attractive. She wouldn’t have been compatible with a balanced, caring, mature and “trouble-free” man.

In order for her emotional ecosystem to function properly, she needed the ups and downs, the sparks and the regular drama. Without ever realizing it, she had an inclination to replay the old, dirty metaphoric song her father sang to her over and over and over—until she left this earth.

You can get a girl out of an alcoholic household, but you can’t get the alcoholic household out of the girl—at least not without some form of psychotherapy.

Relationship Games

A relationship can be a great source of pleasure and adventure. But there is equal potential for it to be a source of pain, misery, hurt feelings and disappointed expectations. And there is no area where emotional insecurities become more visible than on the petri dish of romantic relationships.

Either both partners open up, make themselves vulnerable, and have a real encounter, or they spend their time playing “relationship games,” as psychotherapist Eric Berne called them.

One of the various games he identified was “If it wasn’t for you”: the woman blames her husband for not letting her live a full life. Maybe she thinks about opening a yoga studio or writing a book about the beauty of living with dogs. But her husband prevents her from living “her dreams” and suppresses her efforts to turn them into reality.

Deep inside, however, the woman is afraid of leaving her “provisional life,” which might be dull and boring but, at the same time, is very emotionally safe and comfortable. She likes the idea of running a yoga studio, but she would be too scared to follow through and make it a reality.

With a husband who suppresses her efforts, she never needs to confront the fact that she is actually the one who stands in her own way.

At the other end of the relationship spectrum, the man can attempt to transcend his feelings of powerlessness by exerting dominance and control.

Many relationships that look abusive from the outside carry a hidden win-win aspect of perverse enjoyment. Games are thus the fuel for relationships in which people don’t really love, but instead use each other.

In that sense, there is usually no loser in a relationship—at least not in the Western world, where people can choose their partners freely.

How to Become “Game-Free”

In mature relationships, both partners are honest about their feelings and secure enough to tolerate the occasional feelings of ambiguity and adversity. This necessitates a high sense of self-worth on both sides.

If you happen to be in a dysfunctional relationship and you decide to become game-free, chances are you won’t stay with your current partner in the long term—because it’s rather unlikely that he or she will change with you. In order to find a person who is game-free, you need to already be or become game-free yourself.

The women I found attractive and desirable in the past, I nowadays wouldn’t wish on a snake. In my twenties, I just couldn’t make sense of women, and I used them as a means to get approval and feel successful. The more arrogant and distant, the more interesting those women seemed to me—not very surprising since my mother never gave me any attention.

I learned to dismantle my many defenses and fears with regard to women and with people in general. Only then could I begin to communicate without the need of a fake persona mask for protection. If it weren’t for therapy, I’d be still running around chasing dysfunctional women in bars and clubs.

The best-selling author Tucker Max is a living example of, successful emotional transformation. In his 20s and early 30s, he ran around drinking, hitting on women, and constantly getting in trouble. He then wrote down his stories and earned fame and fortune.

It wasn’t all bad—if you’re 20 and you’re “playing all your chips,” that might be just the normal thing to do. After all, he lived a lifestyle that many men secretly admire.

Tucker Max, though, realized at some point that much of his questionable behavior was rooted in his cold, neglectful upbringing by his parents and especially his mother. It dawned on him that his long-standing unconscious hatred of women was caused by his traumatic relationship with his mother.

He decided to see a psychotherapist and made it his main goal to get his emotional life in order. Now he is in a loving relationship and has a son. He regularly writes and talks about his transition—and about how psychotherapy helped him in that endeavor.

1. Benefits of psychotherapy: Improved Looks and Health

I get a bit of a shock when I visit my old hometown and bump into people I grew up with. Many of them look 10 years older than they actually are, and their formerly youthful faces now look weary and set in their ways—as if there’s nothing new to explore in their lives anymore.

When depression hit me hard at 24, I stood at my bathroom mirror, noticed the dark circles under my eyes, and didn’t find much joy imagining myself 10 or 20 years in the future. I was afraid that all the stress of my daily life would translate into looking like an old shoe.

In spite of many years of trouble, stress and depression, strangely, that didn’t happen. To my surprise, I learned that one of the benefits of exposing oneself to challenges and stressors is aging well.

“What does not kill you, makes you stronger,” the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed. He was one of the first to put into words that the human psyche and body is a complex system and actually benefits from a certain level of stress, rather than being harmed by it.

Later, Nassim Taleb came up with the term “antifragile” to describe an entity that grows stronger and benefits from stressors and volatility—like muscles in the human body, or the human psyche.

Humans need psychological stressors, such as getting out of their comfort zone, once in a while for their mental health and well-being. Psychotherapy motivates people and accompanies them in exposing themselves to more stressors and doing things they want to do but might be afraid of doing.

There are, however, stressors that lead to no growth at all—like being around dysfunctional people. Then you would do better to remove yourself from the scene.

The Mechanistic View of the Human Body

As a child, I often suffered from constipation and stomach cramps. My mother never seemed to grasp that those phenomena could be indicators of how I felt. Today experts estimate that the majority of all chronic pain disorders are caused by psychological rather than somatic issues—back pain being the most prominent among them.

The large majority of health-care professionals have received an education that was founded on a very mechanistic and scientific worldview. They see and treat the body like a broken machine with a “just-exchange-spare-parts” mentality—instead of realizing that they are dealing with an interconnected, complex system.

The human body and mind are partners, and medical interventions of any kind can often lead to unforeseen and even harmful results.

A great number of the most widespread diseases, such as diabetes, can be traced back to an unhealthy lifestyle. Too many people overeat, move little and get fat. But why do they do that? Probably due to a few reasons, but at the root are mainly serious emotional issues. When people feel empty, they fill their emotional void with cheeseburgers, Coca Cola and ice cream—and eventually get diabetes. It is known that in dysfunctional families, oral gratification often replaces emotional attention.

If people would care more for their souls, they’d need fewer pills and become ill less often. But don’t expect the pharmaceutical industry to step up and tell people to address their real, underlying psychological problems instead of taking prescription drugs.

On the other hand, many people don’t want to face up to the real causes of their problems and prefer to pop a couple of pills once in a while.

1. Benefits of psychotherapy: Better Career Prospects

After a couple of years of intense emotional and financial struggle after my studies, I was finally able to secure a good job, earn decent money, and live in a place and environment I liked. Something felt wrong, though—I couldn’t accept my good life and the moderate level of success I had achieved. I didn’t feel that I was allowed to be free of imminent struggle.

Defenses Against Success/Self-Sabotage

In college, I was able to pass all my courses and score above-average grades, but I could never start studying more than two or three days before exams. In high school, I sometimes stood at the chalkboard and taught my classmates math skills that were crucial for passing the test later that day.

However, when the actual test lay in front of me, I usually panicked and in the end only barely passed. My father always said, “Our family is just bad at math—there is no way around it.” I don’t know whether I sabotaged myself because my father told me that math is not in our family’s DNA or because I didn’t allow myself to succeed in general.

Successful managers often sabotage themselves the moment they get close to being promoted to top management. It seems counterintuitive, but a lot of people are subconsciously afraid of surpassing their parents. As a result, the more successful your father or mother, the more successful you are usually allowed or even expected to be.

The lower your social caste, the higher the possibility that at some point you will sabotage yourself when it comes to swimming with the pond’s big fish. The lower social classes have always protected themselves from feeling inferior by labeling higher classes as arrogant or aloof.

This often fear-driven antipathy is rarely put into words when children are socialized, but it is in the air and is communicated nonverbally to them.

Should they later be on their way to joining the higher ranks, they subconsciously might be afraid to break with their family, so they sabotage themselves at the last minute.

The same logic applies to money: many people say it’s bad, but somehow they all seem to want it. If you have been raised by people who conveyed, in one form or another, that money is evil, how can you feel good about financial independence in later life?

If you don’t look at the thoughts and feelings that unconsciously drive and trigger you, chances are you’ll trip yourself up at some point in your quest for success.

The Performance Myth

Middle-class people in particular tend to believe that every advancement in society is directly linked to performance. In the Western world, that’s what you are told in school, in college, and by the media.

But performance is only one of many prerequisites for advancement in a company or organization of any kind, as sociologist Michael Hartmann has explained in his many books and presentations.

You might have realized at some point in your life that the world is not fair. And neither is the distribution of opportunities in society. Some people work their asses off, wash dishes, clean offices, and never make enough money to wear anything finer than polyester.

On the flip side, however, one of the few variables we actually can control in this life is: effort.

1. Benefits of psychotherapy: Bonding Authentically with the “Right” People
   Our family doctor was about the highest social animal within my reach when it came to meeting influential, interesting or inspiring people while I was growing up.

I rarely met those kinds of people, while other kids saw their fathers mingle with CEOs and heart surgeons every other Saturday around the breakfast table. For those who grew up in such a setting, the apparent hot shots aren’t remote figures of idealization, but rather just Tom, Bob and Seth who sometimes brought along chocolate.

Every time I met someone who scored a little higher on the social ladder than I did, I felt inferior. That made me try to compensate for my perceived shortcomings by making an effort to come across as worldly, well-spoken and educated.

It wasn’t other people’s fault, though—it was my own mental setup that made me feel strange around them. Looking back, most of these people were friendly, open and good company, but I just couldn’t relax in their presence. How can you possibly bond with a person when you project all your heavy emotional baggage onto them?

People with power of any kind (money, status, looks, and so on) often act as triggers for people’s deep-seated feelings of inferiority. And it’s neither easy nor comfortable to be the person projected upon.

Surely it can be a daunting task to feel sufficient around people who might be better looking, more intelligent, more successful or far richer than you are. But the moment you start comparing yourself, you lose.

But why is this important for your career? Because most of the executives and other people in power in many professional fields are members of the higher classes. The closer you can get to interacting with them as you do with every other person you know, the better for both of you.

If you can’t, it might not only harm you career-wise but may also deprive you of the opportunity to get to know really interesting and cool people. It’s a shame to miss out on that just because you have been raised in a certain way. It is, after all, a very strange of form of “racism” that generally hurts you more than the person discriminated against.

How to Get There

It’s not easy to emulate the serenity of the bourgeois and come across like one of them—and you don’t actually have to. Growing up in a higher-class environment might give you a serious edge, though. In a nutshell, my ultimate goal is to be my full, unique self around everyone, regardless of their class or level of influence.

It’s not enough to purchase the latest edition of The Etiquette of the Higher Classes to turn oneself into a social super-hub of upward mobility. The people who follow those instructions usually overdo it and try to be too perfect—which actually makes them come across as weird and uneasy. Like when you meet a beautiful woman and think you need to do something special in order to make her become interested in you. But chances are the additional effort and concern make you a lot less attractive in her eyes.

It’s a highly emotional issue, and no matter how knowledgeable or smart you are about those things rationally, you cannot help but feel and act in a way that is determined by your early childhood experiences when you find yourself in the midst of the situation.

In order to be your full self around everyone, there is no other way than to learn to be emotionally mature and independent. The subconscious is not an easy partner to dance with, and the only effective way to slowly reverse your socialization and develop a positively charged form of indifference is psychotherapy.

Bosses Need to Have Their S@!#t Together

When it comes to leading the pack, you cannot look outside or up and down for direction or guidance—especially in today’s turbulent and ever faster-changing times. Now more than ever, as a leader, you’ve got to have your s@!#t together. Only when you know and respect your unique values and boundaries can you be an effective front runner.

Since everyone in a company, organization or group of any kind looks to the boss for direction, a major part of his or her job is to be calm, positive and composed. When a person in charge acts fearful and pessimistic, that virus might spread and infect the entire group of followers.

People who are emotionally stable, resilient, polite, generous, easy to talk to, well mannered, serene and positive have always been in short supply. Those character traits rarely fall from trees—most successful people have worked very hard on themselves to get where they are today. By now it shouldn’t surprise you that many of the great influencers you regularly see on TV have undergone some form of professional coaching and/or psychotherapy.

1. Benefits of psychotherapy: A Higher Level of Creativity

According to Erich Fromm, “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” Take China, for example—it is the factory of the world, but more than one billion people don’t seem to be able to come up with notable technical or cultural innovations.

And how can they think outside the box when they have been raised to shut their mouths and do as they’re told all the time? One can and should criticize the United States in many ways, but somehow it still seems to be the largest center for creativity and innovation worldwide.

Thinking what, up until now, has seemed unthinkable and unknown isn’t easy. Kevin Spacey’s character in the TV series House of Cards says, ”Imagination is its own form of courage.”

Creativity and ideas are the capital of the 21st century. The more you achieve to liberate yourself from the old snakeskin of your conditioning, the more you become creative and open doors to new ways of thinking. Psychotherapy does exactly that.

1. Benefits of psychotherapy: You’ll See Through S@!#t in Society

Historically, the group was key to the individual’s survival. Deviating from the pack’s values and ideology hence could result in your being expelled from the tribe and render you subject to certain misery and even death.

That might explain the resistance and fear people tend to experience when they attempt to live according to their own values. And it all starts in the family, the smallest social unit there is. One should start with the investigation here and look at how many lies, petty politics and intrigues happen in the often so harmoniously presented structure of living together.

Especially today, with millions of people living together in big cities, not everyone can just do what he or she wants to do, or else the complex, interlocking system could not function the way it does. Imagine if everyone respected his or her feelings and needs all the time—modern society couldn’t exist in its current form.

The system is organized to instill and maintain “social order”—less as the result of a secret conspiracy and more as the effect of a grown system that has developed over a long period of time.

This mainly happens through the distribution of power and hence money, as Benjamine A. Rooge explains: “Give me control over a man’s economic actions, and hence over his means of survival, and except for a few occasional heroes, I’ll promise to deliver to you men who think and write and behave as I want them to.”

Civilization has always been a complex interplay between individual and society. A wolf that doesn’t abide by the rules of the pack is thrown out.

Or, becomes the leader of the pack.

People’s Defenses Against Becoming Socially Aware

Even if most people would profit a great deal from understanding and recognizing their invisible chains, they are often very hesitant to do so. They prefer to cling to the illusion that they are free and are only limited by death and taxes.

People love their illusions; don’t expect to be greeted with open arms if you try to shed light on theirs. Somehow they might even enjoy being “ruled” and relieved of the various “horrors” of freedom. The Roman writer Sallust said, “Most people are only looking for fair leaders.”

And observing how many times we lie to ourselves and others, why should society as a whole—which is the accumulation of individuals—be any different?

Too many people are running around wanting to change the entire world, yet they don’t include themselves in the equation. The only way a society can make profound changes is when everyone changes his or her own thoughts and psychology. The only thing you can do is change yourself—and that’s damn hard.

1. Benefits of psychotherapy: Living a Truer, Freer and More Meaningful Life

From day one on this Earth, our natural ability to follow our instinct and intuition is sabotaged by our parents and society. For every decision, we apparently need an outside expert opinion—when we actually already have all the answers and solutions within us.

Psychotherapy helps you reverse that process and supports you to regain trust in your own abilities and judgment. That way, real confidence and self-reliance develop.

As soon as we speak and act from a place that is fully congruent with ourselves and our feelings, we are living a good and authentic life. This individuation is a lifelong task, and we never reach a state where we are totally independent from outside influences.

It is a tough call to be one’s unique self in a society that, according to Erich Fromm, has one tendency: „To shape the psychological energies of its members in a way that people enjoy doing the things they need to do.”

Needs/Radical Acceptance

Even before we are born, people come up with plans for us. Most of our wishes and needs are, in fact, learned. But there is no actual script to follow; one of the most important things in life is to respect our own needs and wishes.

That might sound very selfish, but only when we learn to look out for ourselves can we adequately help other people—should we want to. We often have to relearn that our needs matter and that it’s okay not to please others all the time.

I first had to learn to be alone—to focus on myself and truly accept everything I felt and thought—and I still have quite a long way to go. Most of us are raised to only accept the good thoughts and suppress all the undesirable ones. But there are no wrong thoughts, and all of them have their right to exist. Thinking about punching people doesn’t necessarily translate into doing so.

The opposite is actually true: the more you are aware of your thoughts and feelings, the better you can control your impulses.

Therapy made me realize that the only thing in life we really have to succumb to is dying. The rest is negotiable.

Social Surgery and Its Effects

Once you have started the process of examining yourself, there might be consequences: you could find out that your long-praised parents actually do you more harm than good, and that your still-cherished friends put you down and belittle your efforts.

Some people might not like the fact that you become more confident and independent. As a natural consequence of this relational Darwinism, conflicts and arguments are likely to emerge with those people.

Perhaps you then come to the conclusion that some form of social surgery is necessary—that you’ll fare much better by cutting some people out. One can’t be everyone’s darling anyway: “He who has many friends has none,” Aristotle said.

When I started seeing a therapist, I couldn’t fool myself anymore and had to acknowledge that I was hanging out with people who didn’t do me any good. Before, I took people’s s@!#t and kept smiling when they violated my boundaries. That’s the kind of people you attract when you don’t respect yourself. After around two years of therapy, I conducted my fair share of social surgery and cut ties with most of my childhood friends.

It’s a challenge, but you can rebuild your social circle with people who fit your new reality better. Letting go of old friends and certitudes is quite a project, but as Nietzsche said, “No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

1. Benefits of psychotherapy: You Become More Honest And Entertaining

It takes balls to speak your truth in a world where you are expected to pay your taxes, raise children, be a good citizen, not criticize authority, and shut up.

Benefits of psychotherapy: Become more entertaining
Benefits of psychotherapy: Become more entertaining

The only people the system allows to openly swim a bit against the current are comedians and artists. They get their little fenced territory where they can be honest—and as long as nobody takes the jesters seriously, the silent agreement stays in place. Society can then pat itself on the back and applaud itself for being so open-minded and enlightened.

Most people are faceless, commoditized individuals who are seemingly interchangeable like printer cartridges. If, in a room full of people, you are the only one who speaks the truth and acts in an authentic fashion, you are going to stand out.

James Altucher wrote an amazing blog post about what happens when you are complete honest, and I decided to steal most of his ideas for this chapter.

When he started being radically honest, people thought he was crazy, stopped talking to him, and suspected that he was about to kill himself. However, they also found him very entertaining and, since he always spoke the truth, they trusted him.

The process of psychotherapy has been an amazing training for me with regard to “speaking from the heart.” People don’t get sick from the truth—they get sick from lying to themselves, lying to others, and being lied to. And, of course, you always have the option to not say anything.

Speaking your mind, being authentic and not hiding your imperfect and vulnerable sides take a lot of strength. Put in terms of evolutionary biology, it is a costly signal for the signaler, a self-imposed handicap that historically only the most powerful and independent men were able to afford.

Back in Stalinist Russia, you were very likely to be beheaded if you announced what everyone silently knew but nobody had the balls to speak out loud. Instead of people being put off by honesty, I had the experience of those I wanted in my life appreciating my earnestness.

In a world full of superficial marketing slogans and public relations, people long for authenticity. That’s why they read books—because besides creating melodic sentences, the author’s job is to be honest to the core and put into words the thoughts and feelings that so many people have but never utter.