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Your partner, friend or one of the parents gets tired, nervous, sleeps badly, quarrels with everyone … There is a great temptation to advise in this case to turn to a psychologist. But is professional help always necessary?
1. A psychologist is not always needed
Not all mental suffering requires the immediate intervention of a psychologist, many of them can be dealt with on their own, with the support of loved ones, explains psychoanalyst Claude Almos.
An unexpected loss of a job, disagreements with children or an attempt to find answers to the question of the meaning of life, the death of a loved one or the breakup of relationships – in such difficult situations, first of all, the help of those who are able to listen and support is needed.
It can be a psychologist, but also friends, parents, colleagues … You need to contact a psychologist, psychotherapist in two cases:
- when there are no visible reasons for concern, but a person speaks about himself and his condition something like this: “I’m fine, but I just don’t want to live at all”, “I don’t see the point in living”;
- when, after a really difficult / tragic incident, a person begins to devalue everything that he loved, closes in on himself.
Important addition: rushing to send a loved one to a psychologist, not letting him try to figure it out on his own does not mean helping him. It means to deprive him of his powers.
2. How Not to Advise Asking for Help
The phrase: “You should go to a psychologist,” even if you tried to say it softly and delicately, is likely to sound like a bolt from the blue. Deciding to go to a specialist is really very difficult.
Someone is afraid of being “crazy” or feeling unable to figure out on their own what is happening to them. Others do not want to open up to a stranger …
The first thing to do is try to get in touch with him.
But there are also unconscious reasons: our unconscious resists an attempt to understand and stop mental suffering. It doesn’t want its cause to be discovered at all…
Important addition: the phrase “go to a psychologist” can give a person the impression that they want to get rid of him. Because it has become “abnormal”, uncomfortable, burdensome… And then this fact runs the risk of entering into a tragic resonance with the past: “Once I was already a burden. For your mother.”
3. Create a connection
When a loved one feels bad, the first thing to do is to try to establish contact with him: to realize the strength of his discomfort, his experiences. But this does not mean at all to play with him in a psychologist!
First of all, he needs to be held by the hand again and helped in the beginning of the journey.
You are the first point of support. You just need to be there, just listen. This will allow him to assess his problems and begin to rebuild himself, realizing that he has someone to rely on. Later, if he decides that he needs psychological counseling, it is important to support him in this decision.
Important addition: when an adult feels bad, childhood experiences always awaken in him … At such moments, he needs, first of all, to be held by the hand again and helped at the beginning of the journey. It will be a pity if the fashion for everything psychological leads to the fact that we forget about the human that (for now) is between us.