Illustration: Eleni Kastrinoyannis
Some people stubbornly refuse to start psychotherapy. Are they afraid to turn to their psyche or do they really not need it?
Psychotherapy makes you lighter, more conscious, brings you closer to your authentic self. These are some of the realizations made by a person who has invested time and money and is committed to a psychotherapeutic process with a specialist.
Putting aside the difficulty of commitment due to financial reasons (which is also debatable), what is it that makes a portion of people stubbornly refuse to sit on the analysand/therapist’s couch or armchair and benefit from what the therapeutic relationship has to offer? Is there really a portion of people who do not need psychotherapy? We asked psychiatrist-psychoanalyst Savvas Savvopoulos this question and got his answer in the video below.
The 3 categories of people who refuse to do psychotherapy
Mr. Savvopoulos classifies people who refuse psychotherapy into various categories. “There are initially those who have a serious to very serious mental disorder and deny that they have a problem . This disorder has alienated them so much, that they feel that any therapeutic intervention – mainly pharmaceutical – castrates them, changes their selves. They are the ones who need psychotherapy the most.”
According to Mr. Savvopoulos, there is also a fairly large part of the population that has less severe mental difficulties . He talks about people “with anxiety, with phobias, people who present a dysthymia similar to depression and of long duration, people who present small somatizations or diseases that come back at regular intervals, such as migraines, spastic colitis, asthma, etc.”. Mr. Savvopoulos believes that these people could benefit from psychotherapy, however they do not want to “dig” into their psyche, because they fear that they will find beasts inside . “So they kind of get hooked on the reality they’re experiencing and don’t want to know anything other than trauma or forbidden desires that are hidden inside them,” she comments.
In the third category, the specialist classifies those who really do not need psychotherapy . “These are people with a structured ego and a very good adaptive function , which allows them to process any difficulties they encounter in their lives, adapt to them and provide solutions. These people, if they don’t have anxiety that’s disorganizing them, maybe they don’t need to resort to psychotherapy,” he concludes.
