What I Learned From the Keynote Speaker

By: Robert Schmidt, M.A.

I was at a mental health agency event in Massachusetts last week where I heard a wonderful keynote speaker who really got my mind thinking about how therapy is supposed to work. This guy shared a really heartfelt story about his difficult childhood in Chicago and his process of change through treatment. 

He’s now working in the mental health field and making a pretty significant impact on his community. He’s is also starting on his doctoral work in the fall. He provided a great example of how therapy can make all the difference for people. When he was done sharing the story someone asked him to describe his therapist, and his reaction was funny: he kind of froze. All he could say about her was that she was very short. He made a joke about it and it seemed to satisfy the person who asked the question but I thought that was really amazing. Here’s this guy who is without question a different/better person because of treatment experience he had when he was young, and yet it was almost impossible for him to talk about the person who helped him make that change or what they did with him to make that change happen.

I think this is a fairly common phenomenon. People don’t always know what it is that their therapists do for them even though they want to give the therapists credit for the positive changes they experience. I think in the case of this keynote speaker, his inability to put a finger on his therapist’s approach was because his treatment process was fairly extensive and he could not have given a sincere answer to a question like “what was the one thing your therapist did that made you?... 

Those sorts of questions are built on false premises. To think that recovery comes from a single moment or a single relationship or a single critical realization is in most cases an oversimplification. We hear all kinds of stories like that on tv or in books but I don’t think they’re genuine. 

I don’t think many people have their minds changed forever by a single moment. Instead, I think that mental health/recovery/change comes from when major realizations get piled on top of one another and tested out in lived experience over time. I think that’s why 28 day rehabs rarely help people, they just don’t allow enough time for recovery to take root.

I like to think of my own recovery as the sum total of the contributions made by many people over a long period of time, and I enjoy thinking about the contributions that each of them made.  I have a file cabinet in my mind of people who were instrumental in my early recovery. It seems to me like each of them just showed up at different times and added different ingredients to the stew that I am now. I’m so glad that I met all of them and that I was given enough time in treatment for each of them to pass through it with me. 

I would encourage anybody who has a loved one in treatment to have as much patience as possible and to encourage their loved one to commit some time to the process, because it doesn’t really get better all at once, that’s not realistic.