In Therapy, the Medium Is the Message
Therapists often introduce us to new tools and practices we wouldn’t have have discovered on our own. Unfortunately, most of us never notice the most important thing they’re teaching us: how to become our own best therapist. To not need them anymore, because we’ve learned to be present for ourselves.
Some of us grew up hearing the phrase “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it,” emphasizing the role of non-verbal communication in how we understand and learn from each other. Much of the meaning encoded into our communication includes physical actions, emotional and physical affect, care and curiosity, and different mediums of communication. There’s an argument to be made that the phrase “Actions speak louder than words” is just a different way to say the same thing. In the 1960’s, philosopher Marshall McLuhan incorporated this idea into communications theory in coining the phrase, “The medium is the message.” Again, a re-characterization of the idea that how a message is delivered is at least as important than the content of the message itself.
Occasionally, a therapist will hit us with some unexpected insight or challenge at exactly the right time that we’re able to accept it. It’s infrequent, but it happens. It’s nice when it does! But no different, really, than something a book, a journaling exercise, or a close friend sometimes provides. These unexpected insights aren’t unique to the therapy couch. What is unique to therapy is that therapists are behaviorally modeling how to treat ourselves and communicate with ourselves. We’re paying too much attention to what’s said in therapy and missing the actual lesson.
What if therapists aren’t so much here to really help us figure anything out, but rather, to teach us how to be emotionally present for ourselves? Maybe today in therapy we talked about our depression or how someone else is making us feel bad, but what was being taught - the medium of the message - was how to provide unconditional acceptance of our feelings and ourselves. What it feels like when our feelings are validated, in hearing that we deserve to be loved. They’re showing us how to comfort ourselves when things seem like too much. They’re showing us how to replace negative self-talk with acceptance, understanding, compassion, confidence, grace, and love from within ourselves.
A therapist’s job isn’t to “fix” us. Their role is to provide a medium through which we learn how to take care of ourselves and to heal ourselves. So, of course. Take notes about your insights and self-discoveries. But more importantly, think about how your therapist communicated with you today. How you felt from how they responded to something you shared. How you can practice doing that for yourself? How did you learn today from your therapist to self-sooth? Through the medium of therapy, we can learn to sufficiently support ourselves emotionally and work to become our own best therapist. To re-train the negative thoughts into supportive ones. To be great parents to ourselves, finally.
