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"
Freeze State
The overwhelm we feel is the point, a political strategy to overload people with so much alarming information and sudden changes that our ability to process is compromised.
Being emotionally flooded can cause a stress response that triggers fight or flight - or perhaps one of the lesser known survival responses - to fawn or freeze.
My default is freeze. In an acute moment, I go numb, mind blank, I don’t know, I don’t care. I stare at a spot on the floor.
Living in an ongoing freeze state, which I’m in now, is disorienting. I want to tune out, shut down, remain helpless. But I’m also operating in constant low level panic. Small stressors - someone not texting me back - can build in scale. Resources are low, irritability peaks. Relational disputes flare.
Since the LA fires and the inauguration, it has been one thing after the next, and I have been unable to regulate my nervous system. In states like this, for me, the answer is always the same: sound & body.
I need sustained periods of NO sound. Music & podcasts off, driving or cooking in silence. Without the din of distraction. This helps me get under the layer of noise and calms me down. Being in nature is nice, but can’t always get there.
When I’m sleeping, I listen to binaural beats - meditations that play music to bring your brainwave patterns into specific frequencies, such as the delta waves, known for deep sleep and healing (I love the app Brainwaves).
I need physical movement. Exercise and walking, yes. I get weekly hands-on somatic therapy to physically release the trauma that is stored and stagnant in my body.
And my latest hook - fad warning - is this vibration machine (pretty cheap on Amazon) that shakes my body for 10 minutes. Shaking activates vagal tone, which is the calming part of the nervous system that helps regulate heart rate and promote relaxation.Shaking can help the body reprocess trauma in a way that allows the nervous system to discharge the trapped energy, rather than holding it in.
What each of us needs is unique, so these are just some ideas.What are the ways you guys are supporting yourselves?
Art by Willem den Browser
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
