Don’t expect too much from therapy.
— James Low
When I first heard James say this on his podcast it stopped me in my tracks. James is not only a Tibetan Buddhism Dzogchen teacher but he also spent many years as a psychotherapist, so he knows a thing or two about therapy.
I underwent a few years of psychotherapy myself and look back on that time as one of the most profound and transformative periods of my life. So much so that I even considered training to become a therapist myself.
For me the benefits of therapy were demonstratively positive. So to hear a therapist warn not to expect too much was startling. As I listened on keenly what James went on to explain made enormous sense to me.
In therapy, broadly speaking, we bring with us stories about our life. How it was, how it is and how we think it’s going to go. These stories are heard and honoured. In most cases the process of therapy affords us the space to rewrite those narratives with new stories.
What James meant by not expecting too much from therapy was to recognise that what we are essentially doing is swapping one set of negative stories for a bunch of new positive ones.
In the end they are all just stories about our life, but not actually our life, not the actuality of our lived experience.
Of course stories have utility but only up to a point. We don’t live the stories of our lives, we live our lives, and the stories come after.
As Alan Watts so eloquently said about Zen:
Zen is feeling life not feeling something about life.