A Great New Year's Resolution: Get Some Therapy!

by Carol Campbell, MFT

While I obviously stand to benefit from new business coming my way, I would like to put out the suggestion that one of the best resolutions for the new year for nearly anyone would be to contact a marriage and family therapist and get some therapy. Here's why:

1. Everybody enters adulthood carrying some sort of painful wounding from whatever went wrong in their years growing up, no matter how wonderful their parents were. Until we get therapy to resolve those issues and heal that wounding, we simply inflict our unresolved problems onto other people, chiefly those we love the most.
    
2. The beginning of a new year truly is an inspiring time to try something that may seem beneficial but scary. The sense of access to a blank page to write on, or to a fresh start on a journey of great importance, really helps us to allow for change.
    
3. Most people spend time with their extended families over the holidays at the end of a year. When we are lucky, those times are filled with delight and become the stuff of great memories to look back on over the years. However, it is also true that family gatherings often are the scenes of bad feelings being stirred up yet again. Grandpa is still a grouchy alcoholic, or Aunt Martha still can't stop from asking intrusive questions, or it isn't safe to seat Uncle Bill next to Uncle Eddie because they are still fighting the Civil War. Think about it: These folks are probably unaware of how miserable they make everyone else. What might you be unaware of about yourself that makes it hard for others to be with you??? Stop being part of the problem, and become part of the solution. Get some therapy!
    
4. At the beginning of the new year we anticipate what is possible. We think about what we would like to have happen. We dream of how much better the world would be if only human conflict would cease. No single one of us can change the world, but every single one of us can change the world we are part of if we take responsibility for being the best person we can be. I don't see how that is possible for anyone who has not had psychotherapy; it is only through a therapeutic relationship with a mental health professional that there can be access to the process of psychological change that heals old wounds.
    
5. Psychotherapy, marriage counseling, family therapy, and psychoanalysis are all forms of therapy that are available to you. Any one of them could be a significant help to you if you want your own family's life to be better in the new year. My wish for you is that you will seize the opportunity and go for it!

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Calls regarding appointments are welcome at my private voicemail: 650-325-2576.

Carol L. Campbell, MFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for individual adults and couples in Palo Alto, California. She has degrees from Brown University and Santa Clara University and has been licensed since 1991. Carol is a graduate of the Palo Alto Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program sponsored at Stanford by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and was a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco from 2010-2011. She is also a clinical member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.