Fear of Psychotherapy: Being Afraid to Meet Yourself

If you're afraid of psychotherapy, you're afraid of meeting yourself. Find out more here.

Reviewed and approved by the psychologist Gema Sánchez Cuevas.

Written by Rafa Aragón

Last update: 21 December, 2022

Admitting that you need help is never easy. In fact, before accepting it, you may find yourself experiencing many obstacles and be more or less at the end of your tether, as you drag around those issues that have been bothering you for so long. However, you finally realize that you don’t like the kind of life you’re leading, and you consider psychotherapy.

When the situation you’re experiencing is overwhelming and you feel dissatisfied, lost, and disoriented, not knowing which way to go, psychotherapy is a good option. It helps you to locate yourself and rediscover your identity.

A resistance to meeting emotion

You’ve been disconnected from yourself for a long time because you were protecting yourself from something. You’ve been avoiding a situation, not wanting to go through it, and distracting yourself by going from one thing to another.

You’re behaving like the kind of person who, after ending a relationship, immediately gets hooked on another one. Those who don’t allow themselves the need to mourn and understand what their loss meant. In effect, you’re disconnecting from the pain and the learning that the situation could possibly bring you.

This way of acting leads you to reject the situation that requires both closure and necessary introspection so that you don’t continue making the same mistakes. In fact, you must make a global evaluation of what’s happening in your life. However, this process is hard and requires resources.

Getting lost in the storm

When you don’t want to be in the state you’re in, you concentrate all of your attention on getting hooked on anything else that allows you to continue being disconnected. This is due to your fear of being without the necessary resources to cope. Therefore, as protection, you decide to escape and run away.

Inevitably, you end up losing yourself, even though your escape temporarily relieves you. In the same way, you’ve lost the opportunity to observe your fears, know your limitations, and obtain a greater knowledge of yourself. Ultimately, this puts a stop to your maturity and personal growth.

This transitory relief has certain consequences, and you can’t sustain it for a long time. However, you can spend a long time going from one thing to another. Finally, you come up against an obstacle and see yourself as totally lost without any type of resource to help you move forward.

As a matter of fact, you’ve been rejecting the kinds of resources that help you move forward. Consequently, you’ve lost the opportunity of learning through the different kinds of experiences that life offers you.

Psychotherapy helps you find yourself again

A psychologist is who you should turn to when you find that you’re lacking the resources to sustain these experiences you find yourself facing repeatedly. Those that cause you suffering and discomfort and you realize you’ve entered a situation from which you can find no escape.

Each person has their own process, with a different time and rhythm. However, the important thing is to begin by building this process and go through it until you find yourself. You’ll learn what it was you didn’t do at the time and you’ll find and acquire the resources that’ll provide you with greater strength. This will stop you from running away from your own experience.

Then, you’ll start to understand and become aware of how necessary it is to go through what makes you sad, leaves you breathless, extinguishes your joy, and fills you with bitterness. In effect, you have to chew on it in order to digest and assimilate it. In this way, you’ll be preparing yourself for what it means to live.