What I've Learned in Therapy
Four years of very vulnerable, possibly insightful reflections captured in under four thousand words
“In transcending its target audience of preschoolers, Nanalan’ could go on to have an outsize presence in the rich history of children’s programming. Like the Australian animated show Bluey, which follows a family of heeler dogs through everyday parent-child scenarios (and has since turned into a $2 billion franchise), Nanalan’ demonstrates how simple storylines can resonate with contemporary audiences by offering an outlet for their most childlike emotions. Put simply, life is full of joy and full of sorrow; one year could be marked by big achievements, followed by another of major losses and disappointments. Even if we don’t have our own Nanas to guide us, a show like Nanalan’ is there to help remind us that what we feel is valid, even when there are things outside our control. Like Mona and her birdie, we can learn to be okay.” -J. Clara Chan
“As every therapist will tell you, healing involves discomfort, but so does refusing to heal. And over time, refusing to heal is always more painful.”-Resmaa Menakem
I’ve been seeing my therapist for four years now.
When I first thought about writing about what I’d learned, I imagined it as a clever summary of pithy takeaways—like mental health cliff notes.
The first flaw in this approach is that my therapist, like most, rarely dishes out direct advice or tidy summaries of what’s “wrong” with me or anyone else.
Still, after 50 minutes a week for four years, I heard lots of gems.
Since we started meeting, I’ve filled a Google doc with 35,555 words of such insights.
Here’s four years of therapy distilled into nine bullet points:
Your greatest weakness is usually your greatest strength with the volume turned up too loud.
You aren’t responsible for how other people regulate their emotions.
How anxious you feel about something is a reliable indicator of how much you care about it, not how likely it is to happen.
There are almost always more ways to handle a situation than you initially see.
The only person you can truly change is yourself. Instead of trying to get others to behave differently, we’re better off understanding why they bring up strong feelings in us and working to better know those feelings.
Avoiding conflict at all costs means sacrificing your own needs to placate others. Prioritizing “keeping the peace” means putting others’ feelings and perceptions of you above your emotional truth. In any relationship, conflict isn’t something to avoid, but something to work through with compassion. Tough conversations are important and often easier than expected.
Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.The first time you set a boundary with someone, they may perceive it as a threat and that’s okay.
There is a beauty in grief. Grief is a recognition and an honoring of what has been. We don’t grieve what didn’t matter. Instead of avoiding grief, we should lean into it as part of living and loving deeply.
All emotions are messengers, even and especially hard and negative ones like anger, anxiety, jealousy, and sadness. Anger in particular often masks sadness. Instead of fearing anger or suppressing sadness, invite it in and ask why it’s there. You might be surprised by the answer.
The strange thing about this exercise is how simple and fun it was to do, yet how insufficient it feels to read.
These bullet points are as poetic and insightful as a PowerPoint presentation about a sunset or a ChatGPT summary of the “I Have a Dream” speech.
Like a great joke, a magical afternoon, or a spiritual journey, merely describing the benefits of therapy falls short of capturing what they really are.
Indeed, if therapy’s benefits could be conveyed via bullet points, the world would be a much happier and more peaceful place.
Like exercise, healing can’t just be understood or described; it must be practiced and embodied to become real.
Like religion, you can only convey the benefits of therapy through analogy and metaphor.
The rest must be seen, felt, lived.
I say this not to make therapy into something holy, exclusive, or prestigious, but rather to underline how non-groundbreaking what I’m saying and what I’m about to say really is.
Anyone who has made a positive change, big or small, already knows most of this.
As Josh Weissman once told me on a podcast, “The answer is simple. Doing it is hard.”
Still, my bullet points weren’t a total waste of time.
Writing them made me remember how revelatory the last one was when I heard it.
My therapist put it better, though: “Feelings are our friends.”
That simple assertion changed how I saw therapy and myself.
Like many, I delayed therapy for years because I thought growing up privileged and needing mental health support were mutually exclusive—nothing truly terrible had ever happened to me, so why would I need professional help?
Sure, my parents divorced, but so had the parents of 45% of American children.
Why did I deserve therapy?
Surely some of those kids had ended up as more dysfunctional adults, right?
This is the kind of deflection and obfuscation that keeps many away from therapy.
It’s what my therapist pointed out when I showed up one week in a self-loathing spiral, certain I was wasting everyone’s time.
She kindly shared the distinction between “upper-case t Trauma” and “lower case t trauma.”
Major life disruptions—war, famine, disease, domestic violence, or the death of a loved one—are upper-case 'T' Traumas.
Other events, whether they happen too fast, too intensely, too soon, or without being properly integrated into your life story, can still cause problems.
These are lower-case ‘t’ traumas.
They end up as a sort of mental scar tissue.
Until they’re worked through, they’ll follow you and show up in everything you do.
Understanding this made me feel better about spending 50 minutes on Zoom with a stranger each week.
Comparing my pain and anxiety to others' was missing the point.
Pain is pain, and dysfunction is dysfunction.
No matter where they come from, if they’re negatively affecting your life, they’re valid and worth addressing.
When I first started therapy, I falsely assumed my therapist’s job was to listen to me tell secrets.
She was a friend I paid to vent to.
I’d bring her weekly gripes like a cat dropping dead birds on its owner’s doorstep.
If I’d had a rough week, I took a strange pleasure in knowing I had something worth discussing, like this justified the cost of the session.
This was easy to believe because there was always something to complain about.
Our brains are excellent at cataloguing grievances, like librarians of negativity.
After listening, she’d encourage me to get embodied and curious.
Besides what was bothering me, how was it bothering me?
What was was the experience of being bothered really like for me inside?
These deft pivots, her persistent emotional jiu-jitsu, helped, but also led me to a second false assumption about therapy, that its purpose was to help me intellectualize my emotions.
I believed if I could craft a big enough, accurate enough theory about my life, I could outsmart the pain.
That didn’t get me far.
As anyone who listens to The Ezra Klein Show or The Daily knows, having an articulate explanation for how messed up something is doesn’t make you feel any better about it.
In fact, it’s often the exact wrong prescription for your precarious serotonin.
It took years of barking up this tree to realize that emotions aren’t just meant to be understood intellectually—they’re meant to be felt.
When my therapist urged me to get still, stay curious, and go inward, I realized my problems didn’t stem from a lack of someone to confide in or an inability to articulate my feelings—they arose from my unwillingness to feel my emotions until they overwhelmed me.
This had to change.
We tried a wide variety of activities to get me out of my head and into my body.
She had me create a playlist of high school songs and dance freely around my apartment, letting the music guide me.
I journaled for hours and hours about my anxieties and hang ups.
We listened to “Exile” by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver together, trying to help me cry during the session.
These exercises were as perplexing as they were unexpectedly effective.
My brain and intellect had gotten me so far in life— how was it that I knew so little about my own emotions?
What I discovered surprised me.
In one session, I was rambling about a tough conversation I was avoiding, until my therapist interrupted:
“Reilly, the conversation will be fine. You’ll be fine. The only hard part will be the feelings.”
She was right.
She’s usually right.
This was one of the first “aha” moments of therapy for me.
One of the hardest parts of adulthood is managing strong emotions—both our own and others’.
Events like death, disease, and divorce bring acute pain, but it’s the deeper feelings they stir in us that cause us the most suffering.
These feelings linger, like an infection after a cut, sometimes long after the injury is gone.
Dealing with big feelings isn’t something they teach in school, though I increasingly think they should.
Like figuring out taxes, emotional regulation is something we must learn at home, or not at all.
Emotional regulation is as nuanced as the tax code, but mastering it yields no financial returns.
This is why many people come up short, through no fault of their own, and no fault of their parents.
Most children often see their parents handle emotions in one of two ways: either through repression and stoicism or through impulsive outbursts.
The two styles are often and understandably interconnected.
Most of us would rather avoid a tough emotion until it is literally unavoidable.
But by then, it’s too late.
After seeing the surreal documentary The Fire of Love, I’ve started calling these two types of emotional tendencies red and grey volcanos.
Red volcanoes like Kileauea or Etna erupt constantly.
They look dangerous, but are predictable in their danger— the fiery lava flows you get are As Seen on TV.
Grey volcanos like Vesuvius or Mount St. Helens erupt unpredictably and explosively.
They look like serene mountains one day and explode into a destructive cloud of mud and ash the next.
Many adults think they’re not emotional people, but in reality, they’re grey volcanoes.
I was one.
Lest a geologist correct me here, the volcano metaphor is simply meant to convey that neither of these models for sharing emotions is a healthy way to handle them.
We’re all emotional people, but many children learn that feelings are either stifled or erupt uncontrollably, leaving them unsure how to navigate their own emotions productively.
Yet you don’t have to ask a child to see how this leaves us all emotionally impoverished as adults.
You can see the contours and limits of how most people have learned to deal with tough feelings if you bring up something truly heavy and personal.
I was humbled to realize the long list of mechanisms I’d developed over the years to avoid sitting with other people’s big feelings.
These strategies included intellectualizing their problems, unwarranted optimism, downplaying their issues (always a crowd-pleaser), shutting down, dissociating, and my personal favorite: immediately trying to explain or fix the problem.
These approaches are appealing but flawed.
While they are more socially acceptable than outright repression or outbursts, they still avoid the simple task of sitting with a strong, negative emotion.
Until we develop better strategies for handling them, emotions haunt us like smoke monsters.
Only when we stop running from them do we realize how powerful, beneficial, and fleeting they really are.
Therapy’s benefits are both obvious and subtle.
It’s a paradigm shift in how you live, but also a minor tweak in perspective—like wearing polarized sunglasses.
Still, I can now point to a few concrete ways it’s helped me.
I’m more aware of my anxiety and less dominated by it than I was four years ago.
I used to spend the first day of any vacation terrified I’d forgotten to lock the door or turn off the gas, convinced I’d come home to a house both on fire and full of intruders.
Now, I only worry for a few seconds before thanking my anxiety for its diligence and moving on.
One of the biggest gains has been self-awareness, especially around the messy intersection of my body, mind, and feelings.
For example, I was humbled to realize that I, too, get hangry—a lot.
When you slow down and tune in, it’s amazing how often you realize that the world isn’t actually out to get you; you just need a snack, a hug, or a nap.
Sometimes what we all need is a good laugh, a good cry, or just to run around outside and get our zoomies out.
This truth transcends gender, age, and income.
Therapy reminds us that we’re all just big toddlers, still needing rest, food, water, a sense of security, and validation.
This is why shows like Nanalan’ and Bluey have gone so viral on social media, loved by parents and the children they were made for.
The Herculean task of self-parenting is both obvious and deeply important.
It’s the serious truth underneath all of the Nanalan’ jokes.
As an adult, if you don’t parent yourself, no one else will.
It wasn’t Nanalan’, but The Bear that highlighted my biggest lesson from therapy to date.
As I reflected last fall,
In my experience, the crux of trauma is that often your initial attempts to manage the symptoms like depression and anxiety fall short and even exacerbate the problem because you’re focused on the wrong things. You try in vain to achieve or control your way out of your unhappiness, arranging external circumstances endlessly when the real misery is within. Then, you pour water into a colander and end up frustrated when you have nothing to drink.
This led me to a two-part epiphany: no one is coming to save you—and you can still save yourself.
Therapist Lori Gottlieb’s memoir Maybe You Should Talk to Someone illustrates this with a great analogy.
Many people enter therapy feeling trapped and powerless, convinced they are victims of their circumstances.
But as they gain self-awareness, they realize their situation is more in their control than they thought.
They realize the 'prison' they feel confined in has always had the door open—the only thing keeping them inside is their grip on the bars.
Therapy doesn’t tell you how to solve your problems or what to focus on.
Instead, it gently alerts you to the importance of approaching struggles with awareness and choice, rather than habit and reaction.
It reminds you that you can always choose your focus and try new approaches to old conflicts—even walking away entirely.
After all, if the old approaches worked, you wouldn’t still have the same problem.
The funny thing is how habituated we all become to our suffering.
Clinging to our problems becomes a way of feeling in control—better to manage well-known pain than face the uncertainty of real change.
The chaos outside feels easier to manage than the mess inside.
We prefer to be miserable in familiar ways rather than be uncomfortable in new ways.
The flipside of this is the beauty of adding new plays to your playbook and ditching the ones that no longer work.
As I wrote about the philosophy of football,
“the people that tend to get the most frustrated by setbacks tend to over rely on one way to get what they want. When their go-to approach stops working they can feel defeated: people pleasers addicted to consensus suddenly faced with hard-to-please or indifferent colleagues, analytical types that must contend with “illogical” empaths who want validation instead of an explanation or solution, or serial over-extenders who can’t see the additive quality of subtracting commitments— that saying no to things can be just as empowering as saying yes to them.”
Therapy helps us realize we’re free to let go of patterns and beliefs that no longer serve us.
The busy overextender can slow down, the martyr can ask for help, the isolated can seek out connection, and the resentful can heal the grief underlying their rage.
The only way to ensure you don’t get what you want is to refuse to try.
I struggled for years with overthinking, catastrophizing minor setbacks, and getting stuck in analysis paralysis.
I assumed this was just who I was.
I believed I’d always be an anxious overthinker.
Therapy showed me that my intellectual tendencies, while useful at times, were some times the wrong approach.
Some things must be felt, not thought out.
I had strong feelings, and they had important things to tell me.
Repeatedly ignoring them meant ignoring myself, creating a civil war within my own mind.
We’re often told that hearing voices is bad, but we all hear voices in our heads every day.
It’s how we respond that makes these voices good or bad.
I now believe that calmly and non-judgmentally listening to the voices in your head is one of life’s most underrated skills.
This is the most pragmatic view of therapy.
It’s about fully knowing your strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots, so you can show up to tough situations with more tools and wisdom.
Sometimes, this process feels like pulling shards of glass from your foot—painful but necessary extractions that reveal how much suffering you’d been writing off as normal.
Other times, it’s like having a knot massaged out of your shoulder, letting you move through the day with a little less limitation and pain.
For me, therapy’s benefits have felt the most like learning to properly brace my core at the gym.
Bracing is a key part of nearly every movement in weightlifting.
Without a solid brace, you aren’t stable enough to reach your full potential— your squat, deadlift, and overhead press will never be what they could be.
Like exercise, therapy is a form of positive stress, challenging you to center yourself and recruit new resources.
I knew therapy was working not by how I was thinking or feeling, but by what I was suddenly doing.
Once trapped in a fatalistic narrative that others could make big changes but I couldn’t, I realized I’d been neglecting my own needs out of learned helplessness, self-loathing, and overthinking.
Paralyzed by big decisions for years, I finally started making them.
After repeatedly psychoanalyzing Buzz Lightyear and Woody’s social dynamics in session, my therapist encouraged me to share these quirky “Reilly-isms” in writing, so I started the blog I’d been putting off.
I moved out of an apartment that was too small.
I left a job that was no longer a good fit.
Becoming more decisive made me see how limiting and arbitrary the story I’d been telling about myself really was.
Assuming I was indecisive was as untrue and unhelpful as assuming I was disorganized, unathletic, or incapable of sitting in silence.
Like everyone, I’m good at some things and less good at others.
My strengths and default tendencies shine in some arenas and cause problems elsewhere.
Even the things I thought I’d never be good at were learnable, fixable, or negotiable with time, effort, and attention.
The main thing stopping me wasn’t inability, weakness, or unworthiness—it was the critical inner voice poisoning my motivation and self-worth with doubt.
With concrete proof that I could do what I once thought impossible, that voice quieted, and a healthier inner dialogue began.
My grandparents’ stoic generation had little vocabulary for mental health—feelings were either suppressed or channeled into fixing things.
Women were labeled hysterical, while men were told to suck it up and get back to work.
My parents’ generation had therapy, but it was marked by taboo and practiced by Freudian analysts in stuffy offices, more focused on diagnosing neuroses than fostering emotional well-being.
Many still approached mental health as something to fix, rather than nurture.
Today, we live in a golden age of therapy.
Books like The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb became extremely popular during COVID, reflecting our culture’s growing curiosity and openness to once-taboo topics like PTSD, anxiety, and depression.
Movies like Encanto, Turning Red, and Everything Everywhere All at Once made intergenerational trauma digestible and impactful for mass audiences.
Even Silicon Valley has noticed—and now wants in on the action.
Apps like Calm and Headspace offer bite-sized mindfulness lessons, while BetterHelp and Talkspace can connect you to a therapist via your smartphone in minutes.
But wait— there’s more.
Depending on who you ask therapy is now being further democratized—or bastardized—in its newest incarnation: executive coaching.
Love it or hate it, this trend reflects a simple reality of business.
As Dan Duane noted in the New York Times Magazine, executive coaching is in demand because,
“Venture-backed startups simply must scale faster than all but the rarest of human beings can acquire emotional intelligence.”
Once cloaked in stigma, mental health is now trendy—openly discussed on dates, podcasts, social media, and Substacks.
What a time to be alive, and to heal.
Therapy has taught me that working on yourself is a very good use of time, money, and energy.
We’re all engaged in a challenging enterprise with a 100% mortality rate.
The news gets darker, the oceans warmer.
People we love will disappoint us, upset us, and die.
In light of this, we could all use more tools and skills.
But therapy isn’t just another weapon in the self-improvement arsenal.
As I’ve written about Tim Ferris and Andrew Huberman, I’m skeptical of the modern urge to optimize everything, especially the self.
Therapy isn’t about turning your hard-earned money into a more efficient, higher-earning version of yourself.
It’s not about hacking your brain for workplace performance or better relationships.
Therapy is about making space for your messy and complicated experience of life—learning to navigate it with more grace, patience, and compassion.
It’s about learning how to be human in a world that doesn’t always make sense.
Therapy teaches you to be with yourself as you, to recognize your intrinsic worth, regardless of achievements or validation.
Eventually, it allows you to sit comfortably with seemingly contradictory truths—like the fact that you’re fine as you are and capable of more change than you ever imagined.
Like many, I found my therapist on Psychology Today.
Feeling fried to a crisp one day after work, I wrote a boilerplate email and sent it to a dozen therapists.
A few emailed back to say they weren’t taking new clients, while others were.
I did quick phone calls with three of them to gauge the fit.
The first had a sing-song voice and specialized in a form of therapy I didn’t understand.
The second sounded like a surly aunt and made me feel as comfortable as a plastic chair at the DMV.
The third ended up being my therapist.
She had a background in family systems and somatic therapy.
Once I got past her pronounced “Mmmhmm,” I grew to love her approach.
In responding to my initial inquiry in September 2020, she told me via email, “It’s a powerful time for healing.”
Given what a mess 2020 was, I took it literally.
Only four years later do I understand the depth of her words.
It’s the real takeaway of all those Zoom sessions, confessions, deep breaths, tears, and her encouragement to write down another “Reilly-ism.”
Now is the only moment that matters, the only one we control, and the only one we’ll ever truly have.
It’s always a powerful time for healing.
What a beautiful reflection and exploration of this vital topic. You’ve helped me nearly as much as you’ve helped yourself.