Talk. Heal. Change.

Talk. Heal. Change. These three words aren’t just a therapist’s mantra; they’re the very essence of mental health treatment. Let’s unpack each one:

Talk:

• Connecting and being heard: Therapy isn’t just venting; it’s a safe space to explore your feelings, anxieties, and experiences without judgment. It’s like opening a cluttered box of emotions and sorting them one by one. Through talk therapy, you externalize your internal struggles, creating clarity and understanding.
• Processing emotional energy: Holding onto unexpressed emotions is like bottled-up pressure. Talking releases this energy, allowing you to process past traumas, anxieties, and pain. It’s like clearing the emotional airwaves and giving yourself space to breathe.

Heal:

• Integration and resilience: Through talk therapy, you can reconnect with your emotions and understand their role in your life. This integration builds emotional resilience, making you better equipped to navigate challenges and difficulties. It’s like strengthening your emotional immune system.
• Reduced negativity and empowered coping: Sometimes, talk therapy can lessen negative emotions like anxiety, depression, and confusion. But even if the intensity remains, you learn better coping mechanisms, empowering you to handle them with confidence and self-compassion.

Change:

• Transforming thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs: This is the ultimate goal. The insights gained through talk and healing pave the way for positive change. You might alter behaviors, reframe perspectives, or even shift limiting beliefs about yourself and the world. Change is your personal journey, not a destination; it’s about evolving into a more empowered and authentic version of yourself.

“Talk. Heal. Change.” It’s not just a catchy slogan; it’s a roadmap to mental well-being. By prioritizing open communication, emotional processing, and personal growth, therapy empowers you to navigate life’s challenges and create a life you love.

The tagline at the top of this section is “Talk. Heal. Change.” They aren’t just three randomly chosen therapy words. Talk: the basic function in therapy. It opens us up to be heard and to connect. Talking isn’t just venting. When we dig into our feelings and allow ourselves to talk and let the words flow we are in a process something like when we pick up a big box or bag full of all kinds of random things and we dump it out on the table and start sorting it into piles. Talking in therapy allows us to dump all the things we store up in our heads and in our hearts out onto the metaphorical table and start to organize it and make sense of it all. And when we do this in therapy, we do this in connection with our emotions. This lets us channel emotional energy that we have been letting build up or that has been building up without us realizing it, out. We can process what we can see. And when we talk in therapy we can get our pain, our anxieties, our feelings out in front of us so we can process it. What does it mean to process? Back to the box emptied out onto the table metaphor. Processing is getting in touch with our emotional and intellectual inventory and sorting through it to make sense of it all. That is the basic and fundamental value of “talk” in therapy.

So how does this relate to the next word in the tagline? “Heal.” When we connect with someone else and start to sort and process our thoughts and feelings, our traumas and worries, we set the stage for the healing work. Talking allows us to integrate ourselves with the feelings, thoughts and beliefs that we usually disconnect from – worry, pain, trauma, sadness, and many more. When we are integrated we are in a place to be more resilient in our lives and more resilient when feeling and experiencing challenge and difficulty. This like boosting the emotional immune system. Sometimes we can reduce the negative feelings we feel, like pain, anxiety, depression, confusion. Sometimes we can improve our ability to work through those feelings. Either way, we have strengthened ourselves to face the day to day living demands with better confidence and ability. Some people call this “coping.” Coping and becoming more integrated with our feelings gives us the opportunity to heal. When we feel like we are healing, then we are in a position to continue the journey.

“Change” is the last word in that tagline. That word represents what people want out of themselves and their lives, certainly when they are in therapy. When we talk in therapy, when we move toward healing, we set ourselves up for the possibility for change. Change behaviors, change feelings, change perspectives. Even change beliefs – beliefs about ourselves, our lives and the people and circumstances of our lives. Change represents the incremental but certain shift from one place to another or from us being one version of ourselves to another. It’s almost like travel but without ever having to go anywhere. And this change isn’t magical or impossible. It comes from you, from your existing set of skills and strengths that are often unused or unconsidered or unapplied to your own emotional wellbeing. Change doesn’t mean being a different person or even mean being very different from who you are already. It means in some small way you have been able to recover or develop a skill or part of yourself and then allowed yourself to let that part of you help lead the way for change. So “Talk. Heal. Change.” isn’t just a slogan. It is a basic representation of what therapy can be at its best.