Maybe You Don't Need A Therapist. Maybe You Just Need A Community.
carlesmiro | Shutterstock When life got hard, I found a therapist. It seems to be what people do these days. Once a source of shame and social stigmatization, therapy has become oh-so-mainstream, the default option for anyone who is struggling. Which, these days, is almost all of us.
Over the course of multiple years, I’ve seen three different individual therapists and three different couples therapists. I’ve found therapists for my now ex-husband, for my daughter, for my stepson, and for my son. My family has spent hundreds of hours in therapy, and I’ve spent nearly as much time searching for culturally responsive therapists that take my insurance; filling out intake forms; scheduling appointments for various family members; and haggling with insurance companies.
Has this small army of therapists helped? I can’t really say. I can say that nearly every single one of them has failed us at a critical juncture. One left town with little warning for a three-week road trip, one double-booked two consecutive appointments, another had to skip multiple weeks to attend a training, and two never returned my calls when I was in crisis.
Therapists, like all humans, deserve time off. They also deserve grace for occasional mistakes and opportunities for professional development. I hold no grudge against therapists as people or even against therapy as an industry. There are therapeutic techniques that I believe can be remarkably effective, particularly for more serious mental illnesses and disorders, and most of the therapists I’ve met have a genuine desire to help.
Maybe you don't need a therapist; maybe you just need a community
Pavel Danilyuk / Pexels
Is talking to a therapist really getting to the root of our problems?
But also, let’s be real, who are we kidding? When we’re resting the collective mental health of our country on their shoulders, as it seems we are, is this patchwork, expensive, and difficult-to-access solution really going to cut it? And even more importantly, is talking to a stranger in a vacuum really getting to the root of our needs?
When I realized that my own answers to these questions were a hard no, I decided to give a 12-step recovery group a try. My then-husband’s dependence was only one layer of the multi-tiered Challenge Cake I was consuming daily, but it made me eligible to show up and waltz right in.
Okay, I didn’t exactly waltz. I tentatively stood at the front of the church, puzzling over the locked door, until someone approached me and directed me around back. Then I descended the stairs to the basement, my heartbeat quickening a bit with each step.
Save for the courage to enter a room full of strangers, the group cost me nothing. To find it, all I did was a single Google search. It was 1.5 miles from my home and convened at 7 pm, after work and after dinner. I didn’t have to haggle with my insurance company or join a waitlist.
I didn’t have to write five emails and leave three follow-up voice messages and maybe receive one reply a week or two later. I didn’t have to take time off work to attend. I didn’t have to sit in traffic while traveling clear across the city or to an adjoining suburb.
Even though I’m not sure what I expected, the meeting was nothing like I’d expected. Perhaps I envisioned walking into a room full of people who looked as hopeless and broken-down as I felt. Perhaps I thought we’d spend the hour commiserating over our bad misfortune and wallowing in our victimhood. Perhaps I feared we might be preached to, or asked to accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, or given yet another dialogue script because we just needed to learn how to communicate better.
But the meeting involved none of those things. And when I left, even though I’d broken down crying in a room full of strangers, I felt better than I had in weeks. Months, in fact. Maybe years. I’m now nearly three years in, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the group recovery model has transformed my life.
Isolation is the real problem
It is well-established that human beings, and most living creatures, are wired for connection. Perhaps no study illustrates this fact more brilliantly than “Rat Park,” which proved that within a social setting, rats with access to a drug-laced water bottle actually preferred plain water. Isolated rats, by contrast, consistently opted for the drugs. They became addicted, overdosed, and inevitably died.
In a society that seems increasingly determined to drive us apart, most of us don’t have reliable access to “human parks” of our own, especially those of us who can’t stomach the misogyny and hypocrisy embedded in most forms of organized religion.
Our neighborhoods are designed around cars and consumerism, not town squares, while our devices keep us caged inside, screaming at one another across the metaverse. Most of our workplaces, focused primarily on extracting maximum profit, play lip service to teamwork while pitting us against one another for raises and promotions.
If our isolation is a driving factor behind our poor mental health, which I believe it is, can we really improve by talking about our problems in a vacuum with a paid professional? Some of us, perhaps. But as The New York Times has pointed out, the jury is out on whether or not talk therapy works. It can, in some cases, but it certainly isn’t the panacea we hold it up to be.
Therapists made me feel like my problems were largely interpersonal, and that I could communicate my way to better mental health
Antoni Shkraba Studio / Pexels
Group recovery showed me the serenity and joy that so many people are able to find after they take the initiative to restructure their own lives on their own terms. When I felt hopeless, I listened to the stories of people who had been there, done that, and come out stronger on the other side.
This isn’t a sales pitch for 12-step recovery, which, I must point out, is not a for-profit enterprise, and is based on attraction rather than promotion, but it is a pitch for joining a group, whatever group that may be. According to the most recent Social Connection in America report, more than half of all U.S. adults said they attended no clubs or organizations, did no volunteering, and got together with neighbors to help their community zero times over the last year.
And we wonder why we’re so lonely. We wonder why we struggle to find purpose and meaning.
Over these past few years, I’ve consistently found that the best way to show up for myself is to show up for the groups and communities that are already serving me. Not as a martyr or savior, but simply as a contributing member.
My fellow recovery group members rarely, if ever, offer tangible solutions to the problems I’m wrestling with in my day-to-day life. But they remind me that I can share the burden. Even if an entire meeting goes by without anyone saying something I find meaningful or relevant, I know that when I leave, I’ll feel a little more connected and a little less alone.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
