DON'T LET EXAGGERATED WORRIES HOLD YOU BACK
When you stop for a moment to consider how widespread personal problems are—20 percent of Americans have serious emotional difficulties—isn't there something silly, ridiculous, and, frequently, self-defeating in being overly concerned about keeping others from knowing that, for a time, you were depressed, anxious, unsatisfied, and frustrated to the point that you decided to do something about these unhappy feelings?
To be sure, discretion is sometimes prudent. An employer, your family, or some of your friends may be so provincial or bigoted as to think that counseling is close to a misdemeanor. Ignorant or uninformed people do tend to judge hastily and to condemn. But often, if you do have the endurance, many of them are also willing to change their minds when they have the opportunity to understand a little bit about what they fear.
You cannot live for the approval of others. If you believe therapy may help you improve your life, don't allow yourself to be held back by exaggerated worries.
It usually is possible to keep confidential the fact that you have entered therapy when there are especially compelling reasons to exercise foresight and caution. Explain your concerns to your therapist; he or she can then make every effort to help you.
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DOES THERAPY WORK?
Whether or not therapy works is a question that has hounded psychotherapists for more than thirty years, when evaluative studies began to cast doubts on its effectiveness. Since then, several hundred studies of the effectiveness of psychotherapy have been made. Some of them appear to show that psychotherapy is highly successful, and many have pointed to evidence that psychotherapy is no more effective than no treatment at all.
The ambiguity about this issue has been very troublesome to therapists and tends not to be openly discussed with clients, for obvious reasons.
Why reports about psychotherapy's effectiveness have been so contradictory and ambiguous has never been made clear. But understanding the reasons behind these opposing claims will give us a basis for optimism.