Psychotherapy—What’s Your Personal Stigma About?
Where does the stigma come from?
Our societies and cultures send us many negative messages about emotional problems, coloring our perceptions of asking for help, stigmatizing those who do.
- Your parents threatened to send you to a shrink when you were misbehaving.
- You associate therapy with mental illness with the people in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or other such movies.
- You learned to believe that people who can’t solve their own problems are weak.
- Your family and/friends have observed that psychotherapy is for losers or crazy people.
Do people like me do something like this?
You identify with a group, be it senior executive at high tech companies, bikers, Generation X’ers, sorority sisters, intelligence agents, or all of the above. Is therapy something your group does? How would people in my “tribe” respond if they knew? How much do I care?
What does it mean for me to ask for help?
- I can’t handle my own problems.
- My family and friends will think I’m crazy.
- Something is wrong with me.
- I’m just like my grandfather who ______________(fill in the blank).
What messages are in your psyche, and are these messages preventing you from getting the help you need?
