Therapy: An Opportunity to Make the Best Kind of Trouble

Good therapists help you solve your problems. I have considerably more ambitious plans for you.

Plans? Let’s try this on:

I’d like to help you become so gloriously alive that your dog looks at you and thinks, “Well … someone’s certainly in a good mood.”

I’d like your friends to start asking what happened to you.

I’d like your future spouse to thank me. I’d like your children and friends to inherit less fear. I’d even like your ex to become mildly irritated by how happy you seem. I realize that last one may be petty. Whatev.

For decades I’ve listened to thousands of human beings tell me about their lives. Do you know what almost none of them said? “My life has too much joy.” No one has ever sat down and whispered, “Randi … I accidentally became so overwhelmed with joy that I now have no idea what to complain about.” That simply hasn’t happened.

Instead I hear about people who have spent years apologizing for taking up space. People who mistake anxiety for responsibility. People who have been exhausted for so long they think it’s part of their personality. People who think being relentlessly hard on themselves somehow qualifies as virtue. Frankly, I think we’ve all been sold some rather questionable internal software.

Here’s another confession. I don’t actually believe most people are broken.

Complicated? Absolutely.
Magnificently confusing? Without question.
Capable of making spectacularly bad romantic decisions? Have you met humans?
But broken? Not usually.

More often, I meet intelligent people whose nervous systems learned brilliant survival strategies years ago – and then forgot to retire them. That’s a very different problem.

People sometimes ask me what kind of therapist I am. That’s a little like asking someone what kind of musician they are. “I’m a drummer.” … Okay, but can you actually play?

So, do you want the technical answer? Or the interesting one? The technical (feel free to stretch here) answer involves graduate degrees, published research, decades of clinical work, continuing education, and enough professional credentials to make my office wall structurally unsound.

The interesting answer is this: I’m endlessly fascinated by what makes people flourish. Why one marriage slowly dies while another keeps laughing fifty years later. Why one person grows kinder after suffering while another becomes bitter. Why some people seem to radiate life the moment they walk into a room. Those questions have occupied an alarming amount of my adult life. Fortunately, they also happen to have made me a better therapist.

You should also know something else about me. I laugh. A lot. Not because I take pain lightly. Because I take hope seriously.

There are moments in therapy that deserve tears. There are moments that deserve silence. And occasionally there are moments where the only psychologically appropriate response is, “Well…that was an exceptionally creative disaster.”

Healing doesn’t become less profound because you laughed. Sometimes laughter is the sound of fear packing its little suitcase.

My work blends modern psychotherapy with curiosity, neuroscience with meaning, practical tools with the deeper questions that make us human. I care about evidence, but I’m also interested in awe. I believe people heal through insight, relationship, courage, and sometimes by discovering that the story they’ve been telling themselves for twenty years was written by an unreliable narrator.

I’m less interested in diagnosing you than I am in discovering who you become when shame finally gets bored and leaves. If you’re looking for someone who nods solemnly every thirty seconds while asking, “And how does that make you feel?” I regret to inform you that you’re about to be disappointed.

Of course I will ask how you feel. Then I’ll ask why you keep giving everyone else the starring role in your own life and believing what they say about you over your own damn self. I’ll ask what joy would look like if you stopped treating it like a suspicious stranger. I’ll wonder out loud whether you’ve mistaken self-sacrifice for love. And every now and then I’ll say something that makes you laugh so hard you forget you were crying thirty seconds earlier. Those are some of my favorite moments.

People often assume therapy is about becoming less emotional. I think it’s almost the opposite. It’s about becoming more alive, honest, playful, and courageous. And more available to love, more capable of receiving it.

I can’t promise perfect lives. I don’t promise uninterrupted happiness. And despite several persistent rumors, I cannot fix your mother. What I can promise is this: I’ll tell you the truth as compassionately as I know how. I’ll celebrate your victories with ridiculous enthusiasm. I’ll believe in your capacity to change long before you do. And together we’ll see whether your life can become not merely functional, but beautiful. Because in the end, I don’t think the goal of therapy is simply to reduce suffering.

I think the goal is to become the kind of person who dances in the kitchen, laughs until your stomach hurts, loves with astonishing courage, and leaves the people around you wondering, “Whatever happened to them?”

And if therapy occasionally results in spontaneous kitchen dancing (extra points for nudity), improved kissing, or a sudden desire to stop apologizing for existing, I accept absolutely no responsibility whatsoever.

My favorite answer has always been: They finally came home to themselves.

I’m ready when you are.

Song Recommendation:
— You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, 1974

This page is from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.