Maybe you’ve been in therapy for years, perhaps you’re thinking of starting, or maybe you don’t think it’s for you at all. Whatever the case, people have learned valuable lessons about how they view themselves, others, and the world around them through therapy. So Redditor Known-Dot-8314 asked, “What‘s something that you‘ve learned in therapy that you think everybody should know?” Here’s what people said.
1.“Most people don’t actually hate you; they’re just focused on themselves.”
2.“You can’t control the actions of others, and you can’t presume to know their motivations either. A simple example would be, ‘Jack is always drumming his fingers on the desk to annoy me. He knows I hate that!’ The fact is that unless Jack tells you that, you cannot know if that’s his motivation. Most likely, he’s doing it absent-mindedly. I know it’s a silly example, but it applies to many things. We tend to be very self-centered in our thinking.”
3.“Changing the words you use to think about yourself is immensely powerful, even as an afterthought. For example: ‘I’m a piece of shit.’ Or, you could think, ‘I made a mistake, people do that.'”
4.“Boundaries go around yourself, not around others. Putting boundaries around others is called controlling.”
—gpky
5.“The importance of being kind to yourself. I used to struggle a lot with negative self-talk. I used to always tell myself that I was worthless, a burden to others, and I hated myself. To get better, I had to start positive self-talk, telling myself that I was good, loved, and confident, even if I didn’t believe it or cringed at what I was saying. Eventually, the negative self-talk stopped, and I started believing the positive things.”
6.“How to say ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I forgive you.’ I’m not talking about apologizing all the time, but a genuine apology. I grew up in a house with arguments but never any apologies. There were just a few days of silence, and soon enough everything returned to normal. No resolutions, just sweep it under the rug.”
7.“Setting boundaries is not mean or selfish; it’s necessary for healthy relationships. Learning to say ‘no’ and protecting your peace is one of the most empowering things you can do for yourself.”
8.“The human brain isn’t designed to keep us happy. It’s designed to keep us alive.”
9.“Think about The Spoons Analogy as it relates to emotional energy: Every day, you wake up with a certain number of spoons. You give one to your spouse, one to your job, one to your kids, one to your friends, etc. But at the end of the day, you must ensure you’re only giving spoons to people who deserve them and keeping at least one spoon for yourself. Take care of yourself also.”
10.“Hurt people hurt people. If you don’t heal, you will be dangerous in the same way that the people you have known as dangerous were once unable to heal their own wounds.”
11.“When the flight attendants give instructions on what to do during the emergency, they always say to put a mask on yourself first, before you put it on a child. It’s a great reminder that helping others is not a great idea when you aren’t feeling well yourself.”
12.“It’s better to do things half-assed than not at all. So, brushing your teeth for a minute is better than none, even if you didn’t do it for the full three minutes. Washing your clothes but not putting them away is better than not at all. Having those little victories and seeing them as good things instead of failures to do the whole task was the first step for me to actually get things done and not feel trapped by tasks I couldn’t start.”
13.“Self-care isn’t just bubble baths; it’s doing what you need to maintain your mental health, even when it’s hard.”
14.“Don’t judge your feelings. Instead, try to understand where they are coming from. Judge your actions.”
15.“That being ‘selfish’ isn’t necessarily wrong or bad. It certainly can be, but being selfish can also mean setting boundaries, saying ‘no’ more often, engaging in self-care, and more. Being selfish is necessary sometimes.”
16.“My therapist once said, ‘Your thoughts aren’t facts.’ That hit me hard. Just because I think something doesn’t mean it’s true. Learning to challenge my negative self-talk has been life-changing.”
17.“People forget and move on, so let go of that embarrassing thing that happened years ago. You’re the only one who remembers.”
18.“When someone says something about you or has an opinion about you, it doesn’t automatically make it true. Even if that person loves you a lot. My dad would project his shortcomings onto me, and I believed I must be very bad because he said so. But it wasn’t about me; he just put it on me. And I’d also like to add: just because someone doesn’t mean to hurt you, doesn’t make it okay that they did.”
19.“The holy trinity of mental health self-care: sleep, diet, exercise.” It was tough accepting this and getting into a routine at first, but I don’t know where I’d be without it. It was one of the first things that came up with my therapist. She ‘prescribed’ me 15 minutes of exercise a day during our first session, and it seriously changed my whole perspective on mental health care. It doesn’t have to be running 15 miles a day, but if I don’t move my body in some capacity for at least 30 minutes a day, I feel the impact. Now, I look at exercise as something I do for my brain; its impact on my body is just a positive side effect. And that makes it feel like less of a chore, and it is easier to maintain a consistent routine.”
20.“Healing doesn’t mean forgetting or excusing what happened. It means learning to live without letting it control you. And part of that healing is accepting you can’t control others — only how you react to them.”
21.“Just because you’re upset doesn’t mean the other person did anything wrong.”
22.“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 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 you might want to believe.”
What is the most important lesson you learned in therapy — something that actually changed the way you think about or see yourself, others, and the world around you? Tell us in the comments or in this anonymous form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
