BYO Brilliance: The Brilliance of Seeking Help

Seeking Help, especially mental health professional help is one way to show how much you love yourself as well as the people in your life.  Sometimes it is not clear to us or we choose to deny we might be severely out of focus, but this is one why seeking help is so important.  Sure you could inquire with your friends and family as to whether you might be out of balance, but often times they do not look at you with detached balanced eyes.  Essentially they are not professionally trained and their feelings for you may get in the way of giving you a clear answer.  Our loved ones are usually too invested in how they want us to be instead of what is best for us; usually they operate from what they believe is best for us and that may not always match what is truly best.

As psychologists or mental health professionals, our investment in clients should always be for what is best for a better quality of life, not necessarily what is convenient for our loved ones.  The other thing to consider is that seeking therapeutic help does not make one "crazy" or "insane."  In fact people who seek mental health assistance are often the most healthy thinking individuals, because they realize that at times they just need to release troubling thoughts and feelings.  People that keep all that bottled up inside are like to become so pressured that they may end up harming themselves or  someone they love, or complete strangers.

Listen, everyone needs to talk things out without judgement or compromise, including therapists.  Someday the benefits of therapeutic release will be valued and we'll all have low cost to free access to a therapist at least 6-8 sessions a year.  At least that is my hope for the future as a budding mental health professional