Happy New Year to all my friends and subscribers, I hope you had a lovely Christmas and a great start to the New Year. Do you need therapy?

Majendi in front of a Wicked promo in London St Pancras

At the beginning of a new year there are so many thoughts that goes through our minds, what would the new year bring for us? Where will we be at the end of the year? Concerns about life and our families and friends are also thoughts that fill our minds at this time. Pressures from our peers can also create unnecessary concerns and fears about life and the future.

In this episode of Majendi Mental Moments I would like to first of all take away some of the fear we have about seeking and attending therapy.

We all have a fear of the unknown and one of these is therapy. We don’t want to be psychoanalysed by someone we know much more someone we don’t know.

First of all, what is therapy? According to Google, Therapy is the act of caring for someone, or the method of caring. If you have a rare disease, your doctor's therapy will hopefully cure you. Therapy comes from the Greek θεραπεία, for "healing." If someone tells you they are "in therapy," they are probably talking about a psychological kind of healing.

For this episode I am referring to the psychological kind of healing therapy not the one where you have a disease and you go to a doctor to give you something to cure you. To clarify this therapy is the one that addresses the mental and emotional issues a person may have.

Therapy can help you sort out your thoughts and emotions, give you more understanding of what you are going through and sometimes eliminate these issues completely.

The more common type of therapy is talking therapy where a qualified cognitive behavioural therapist otherwise known as CBT helps the person to understand their thought patterns and behavioural pattens. I had one of these when I lost Marley. I had never had any form of therapy apart from “Retail therapy” so it was very hard to agree to it but I did. It was very helpful and gave me some clarity of some of the emotions I was having. The first few sessions were more about building trust and a connection between me and the therapist. It is important that the person who needs the therapy can trust the person who is administering it. I needed someone who would listen to me and I could share some of the thoughts that were in my head.

A therapist should give you space to speak and not bombard you with question after question. Sometimes its ok to have silence while you make sense of what has been said. The fifty minutes of therapy used to go quite quickly and at the end I would be surprised at how much I had shared and how much clarity I had after the session.

One of the key issue I had was not sleeping through months after Marley took his life. I would wake up in the early hours of the morning and I would not be able to go back to sleep. I would start to recount all the steps that Marley had taken that fateful day. When I shared this with my therapist, she gave me some understanding of why I was waking up at that time. My subconscious was telling me that it was around this time that Marley had taken steps to end his life and my subconscious was waking me up in the hope that I could stop him and avert the outcome which had already happened.

I did not know that subconsciously this was why I was waking up until I shared this. She also shared with me how to stop this pattern of waking up in the early hours of the morning. It really worked and I was able to sleep through this particular hour. Most nights I don’t sleep through but I was not waking up at the same time of the night no matter what time I went to bed.

The good news about talking Therapy is that you can do it virtually. You do not have to be in the same place and be in a physical meeting. I know not everyone functions well with connecting virtually but if its something that is not a problem for you then your therapist can be in any part of the world and you will be able to have a successful therapy. Some prefer just audio connection and not visual, I definitely recommend that if you are doing it remotely to have a video connection as this enables you to build trust faster with your therapist than someone who you don’t see.

There are other very powerful forms of therapy which are out there. One of the more common one after Talking Therapy is Art Therapy which enables the person needing therapy to express themselves through drawings, art creation and pictures. The person does not need to be a very good artist to use art to express themselves.

There are also dance, music, horse and sports therapy which can be very effective means of calming your thoughts and behaviour and enabling a person to cope and most of these can be done individually or in a group.

As you start this new year, I want to encourage you to seek therapy if you are constantly having low mood, not enjoying life and feeling a sense of hopelessness.

Therapy definitely works!!

I would love to hear from you if you have had therapy before, what was your experience? Get in touch, share in the comments as you experience will help someone or email me directly.