Every once in a while, my clients come to session saying that they have nothing to talk about because “everything is going well.” This usually means either that a major crisis happened in the last week that they don’t want to talk about, or else, that things genuinely have gone OK over the last week and so they don’t want to kill their mood by talking about any of their difficulties. I get it, since I have done the same thing myself as a client, but it’s also my job as their therapist to point out how their behavior helps or hurts their progress in therapy. To help them understand why everything going well isn’t a reason not to talk about anything, I oftentimes will tell them the following story:
Once upon a time, there was a man who lived in a house with lots of big holes in the roof. Every time it rained, water would come pouring in and drench all of the furniture. One sunny day, the man was sitting on his front porch when a woman who happened to be a roofer walked past and noticed the holes in his roof. “I see your roof is pretty leaky,” she said, “Would you like me to help you fix it?” The man shrugged, smiled, and replied, “No thanks, because today it isn’t raining!”
I almost always get a laugh of recognition when I tell this story. It’s very easy to see why it’s necessary to repair a roof before it rains, but it’s much harder to see the need to work on our emotional vulnerabilities and problems before life stressors come up and cause a crisis. Oftentimes, when nothing is happening to trigger symptoms, we can imagine that our problems are already gone, until the next thing happens. Then it’s already Thursday and we are melting down, but we have to wait until our next session which isn’t until Tuesday!
Proactively addressing problems is critical part in living a successful life (and is also one of the famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) but it takes discipline. Going to therapy at all is a great way of being proactive, and once we are there, we can be certain that there will ALWAYS be something worth talking about, assuming we are willing to talk about what we usually want to avoid. Then we can start repairing our emotional roof before life throws any more storms at us!