What Kind of Support Do You Need?
Therapy can be many things—practical, spiritual, emotional, directive, gentle, fierce.
But what kind of support do you need most?
Here are a few forms of support that therapy can offer:
✨ Advice & Guidance
- You want a clearer path or direction
- You appreciate tools, frameworks, or insights
- You’re looking for help sorting through options or next steps
- You want your therapist to weigh in—not just reflect back
🌿 Safety & Comfort
- You want a calm, grounding presence
- You need space to process without pressure or fixing
- You’re seeking warmth, trust, and emotional refuge
- You want to feel held, not pushed
🔍 Honesty & Transparency
- You want a therapist who will be real with you
- You appreciate being gently called out or challenged
- You’re curious about your patterns—and ready to name them
- You don’t want sugar-coating; you want truth
💛 Empathy & Compassion
- You want to feel deeply understood
- You’re craving emotional resonance, not just analysis
- You’re not looking for quick fixes—you want someone to be with you in it
- You value presence more than performance
🔥 Encouragement & Empowerment
- You want someone who believes in your potential
- You’re ready to be stretched and supported
- You’re looking for accountability as much as affirmation
- You want to feel energized, not just safe
So, what kind of support do you need?
It might shift over time. It might be a mix.
Therapy can be many things.
What do you need right now?
📷: Tippi Hedren, 1962 by Philippe Halsman
Expressing Your Needs
You know the Five Love Languages, right?
The idea is that we each give and receive love in different ways and that relationships can be improved when we know what works best for us and for our partners.
The Five Love Languages:
Acts of Service
Words of Affirmation
Physical Touch
Quality Time
Gifts
But, it’s not so simple.
One of the challenges is that you have to be in tune enough with yourself to know your own needs. And then you have to express them! Not the easiest task for anyone slightly on the codependent spectrum, where it's difficult or foreign to have ... "needs."
The other tricky part is figuring out what your loved ones actually want. Our habitual ways of showing up may not actually do much for them.
You may be leaving them special love notes and feeling all snazzy about yourself and surely your partner enjoys them, but does that realllly make them feel super-duper-loved?
Perhaps you noticed them ogling a little gift shop on your evening walk. If you go back and get them a little trinket from there, they may be extremely touched that you noticed and remembered their interest in the shop.
Part of the fun of being a good partner or friend is to know the other person well enough to help read the subtext of their desires, without them needing to say.
Because it can be hard to ask for what we need.
It’s not our job to read each other’s minds.
But in every conversation there is text and subtext.
And the most skillful communicators understand that not everything is said out loud.
Image: Hilma af Klint: "Possible Worlds"
Building Your Personal Power
Was my absolute pleasure to talk to these two dynamos on @cheaperthantherapythepodcast.
In the 2nd half of the convo, we get into my favorite topic: How to Build Your Personal Power! I do much more babbling on the show but here are some quick ideas:
#1 Our Minds are Something We All Have Influence Over
Even though it may not feel like it, you have control about what goes on in there.
#2 Rule It Like a King or Queen
Your mind is your kingdom. You are the leader and it wants to be led. Learn to do this with meditation by consciously directing your thoughts back to your breath.
#3 Ask For What You Want
It’s hard to let ourselves want something; it’s hard to risk the disappointment and pain of not getting it. But it’s important to say what we want and to let ourselves feel the longing of it.
#4 Say Thank You
Appreciate what you have. We all have many things to be grateful for. Our job is to look for them.
#5 Your Body is the Key
This can’t just be in the mind - you have to use your body. Go from passive body into active. Back erect, legs strong, blood flowing, eyes sharp. Feel like a lion. Extend your arms, imagine you’re palming a basketball. Your hands are not limp, they are magnetized. Lightning bolts could come through. You're building a visceral sense of power.
Now go back to your mind or the issue at hand. Feel any different?
#6 Visualization
Very Important! Neurons in our brain cannot tell the difference between what we're imagining and what is actually happening. If you generate feelings of love in your body, you will actually become more loving.
Feel your whole body in & out as you imagine - up & down, around, within, between, behind, above. Fill yourself up inside - go inside the actual organ of your heart! See the chambers pumping.
Picture someone you love and try to amplify that feeling in your heart. If you can tap into love, that's real power!
Please listen to the podcast @cheaperthantherapythepodcast for more ideas!
Shouldn't I Be Happier?
ANY OF THESE HIT A NERVE?
- I'm depressed or sad for no apparent reason.
- I don't know what I feel or what I want.
- It’s hard for me to ask for help.
- I’m very hard on myself.
- Shouldn't I feel happier than I do?
- I feel numb and empty inside.
- I tend to push down my feelings or avoid them.
- I expect rejection from people. If I let them get too close, they won’t like what they see.
It can be hard for many of us to think critically of our parents or our childhood. This is especially true if we grew up in a loving home with plenty of food and clothing and were never abused or mistreated. You may have some memories about what happened in your childhood, but what about what *didn’t* happen*? Because *what didn’t happen* has as much or more power over who you have become as an adult than any of those events you do remember.
No doubt, parenting is the hardest job in the world, most parents are doing their absolute best, and no one is perfect. But, to love your child is a very different thing than being in tune with your child.
For a parent to be in tune with his child, he must be a person who is aware of and understands emotions in general. He must be observant so that he can see what his child can and can’t do as he develops. And he must be willing and able to put in the effort and energy required to truly know his child. A well-meaning parent who lacks in any one of these areas is at risk of emotionally failing his child.
This Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) is invisible, vague, hard-to-define and is rampant. It can explain many of the empty, lost, depressed feelings described at the beginning of this post.
What’s tricky is that Emotional Neglect is so subtle, it’s barely observable. And it hides in what’s NOT THERE.
EXAMPLES OF PARENTING STYLES THAT CAN LEAD TO CHILDHOOD EMOTIONAL NEGLECT (CEN).
⇨ Anything feel familiar? ⇦
✔︎ THE WORKAHOLIC PARENT:
- By putting their work first, parents send message to kid that her feelings, needs & accomplishments are of lesser importance (damaging child’s self-worth)
- Some children act out to get their parents' attention, others grow up with low self-esteem
- Children often grow up with privilege (don't see themselves as deprived), so they feel guilty for not being happy
- The loss of a parent to divorce/death/etc is perceptible. The loss of a parent to success is invisible & vague
✔︎ THE DEPRESSED PARENT:
- Child feels that he must be perfectly behaved so as not to make his parent feel worse. Grows up having difficulty making mistakes, rocking the boat, or allowing himself to be an imperfect human being
- Parent has little energy, turns inward, focuses on himself & what is wrong with him
- Because parent has little to give as far as comfort or encouragement, child doesn't know how to self-soothe and may turn to drugs or alcohol
- Child feels worthless and is at risk to become depressed himself
✔︎ THE NARCISSISTIC PARENT (a whole other article will be written on this, specifically on the COVERT NARCISSISTICS):
- Demand perfection from their children (because they see it as a reflection on themselves)
- Child's needs are subsumed by the parent's needs (mostly the need to be seen in a flattering light by others)
- Lack ability to imagine or care about what child feels (more focused on the child being successful and may not notice if child is lonely, depressed, withdrawn)
- Parent takes child's behavior personally ("How could you do this to me? Everyone will think we're ... “)
✔︎ THE PERMISSIVE PARENT:
- Often seen as very loving and "cool" by their children, because these parents stir up very little conflict with their children
- Many of these parents have discomfort with conflict themselves and simply don't say "no" enough to their kids (being momentarily hated by your child for saying no is painful)
- Do not provide kids with limits, structure or a strong adult against whom they can rebel
- The children grow up thinking their parents gave them every opportunity and so blame themselves for their inner struggles
- Child doesn't get enough feedback from parents. They treat children like buddies instead of taking opportunities to teach them valuable lessons
✔︎ THE HIGH FUNCTIONING ADDICTED PARENT:
- These are high functioning, loving, present parents whose addictions may not even be identified by the family
- What harms the child is the parent behaves like two different people and the child cannot always predict which side of her addicted parent is going to show up (During the day mom might be kind & supportive, at night after a few drinks she may become mean & frightening)
- With this unpredictable parenting, the child becomes anxious, worried & insecure
- Child has that feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop
- Child learns how to avoid consequences, navigate mom's moods and "play" people
✔︎ THE WELL-MEANING-BUT-NEGLECTED-THEMSELVES PARENT:
- Even the most loving and well-meaning parents can be emotionally neglectful, most probably because they themselves were emotionally neglected
- Parent may not attend to the *feeling* level of life. Mostly lives on the surface of life, not aware of or in touch with the world of emotion
- Parent has blind spots about the connection between behavior, feelings, and relationships and never teaches these to the child
For more, see Jonice Webb, "Running on Empty"
Image: Face House, Kyoto by Kazumasa Yamashita
Why We Get Sick
One of the most frequent issues I hear from clients is about their Chronic Need for Approval.
Us too! While writing about our personal struggles for the bios on our website *every single one* of us therapists chose some version of, "High expectations of myself," "Saying no," "Forgiving my shortcomings," "Disappointing people."
Why do we all need this approval so desperately? I'd say it's something about fear of abandonment, needing to be accepted by the pack so we're not excluded and cast away.
And what effects is this having on our culture? On us individually?
Last week, I devoured Dr. Gabor Maté's book, "When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress - Disease Connection."
Maté writes beautifully on the mind - body connection in health and adds a new layer I hadn't fully recognized:
★ The role of emotional suppression in the formation and development of illness. ★
"Many people unwittingly spend their entire lives as if under the gaze of a powerful and judgmental examiner whom they must please at all costs. Many of us live, if not alone, then in emotionally inadequate relationships that do not recognize or honor our deepest needs. Isolation and stress affect many who may believe their lives are quite satisfactory...
When we have been prevented from saying no, our bodies may end up saying it for us." - Dr. Gabor Maté
After decades of work as a family practice doctor and hundreds of interviews for this book, Maté identified several personality characteristics / types common in patients struggling with Cancer, Autoimmune Disorders, Irritable Bowel Disorders, Heart Disease, MS, and more:
- Chronic need for approval
- Habitual denial, suppression, or repression of fear, sadness, anger
- Compulsive sense of duty to others
- Inability to say no
- Inability to express emotion
- Self-imposed need to conform to society's expectations
- Discomfort asking for or receiving help
In making the link between repressed emotions and the development of disease, Dr. Gabor Maté invites people to look at their relationships:
- How much of your partner's stress do you take on?
- How much of a people pleaser are you?
- How nice are you to people no matter how you feel?
- How much do you take on the problems of other people & ignore your own?
- How well do you know yourself?
He also suggests abandoning so-called "Positive Thinking."
This "Compulsive Optimism" often excludes those parts of our reality that strike us as "negative." However, it is important to include ALL of our reality. We must develop the confidence that we can trust ourselves to face the full truth, whatever that full truth may turn out to be.
What, if anything, is this illness saying about the past & present? What is not working? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to?
Of course, personality does not by itself cause disease; one does not get cancer simply from repressing anger or ALS from being too nice. A biopsychosocial model recognizes that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease and in the creation of health.
Do you recognize yourself in any of these descriptors? Might they be connected to your physical health?
