Thoughts about therapy

As the title suggest, I seem to have been struggling with my spiralling (often negative) thoughts lately. For those who don't know- which I assume is 99% of my friends reading this- I've recently taken up therapy sessions as my company offers them free for employees (go WC!).

As my work friend always suggests in his Asian-ess: "If it's free, why not?"

I used my first free session to talk about a life problem that I have trouble finding the solution to (and not gonna lie, my therapist didn't really help much in that aspect, as I haughtily expected). This whole conundrum of mine started because when I booked my first therapy session, the receptionist pre-booked my second appointment for me without me requesting for one as he said that "it would be busy in the future to get another slot so I've already booked in your second one."

THIS. This is where the problem lies. After my first one, I do not really need another appointment as I felt like it didn't really help me that much and my therapist only told me things that I either already know, or really generic things that I could've searched up on the internet. My therapist also asked me if it was my first time going to therapy and smiled really brightly when I told him yes, and that he's my first therapist ever. He joked that hopefully he isn't that bad and that he lives up to the expectation with a warm smile. 

Being the people pleaser that I am, I felt really bad if I stopped showing up after my first and last session, so even though I didn't have any real problems to talk about, the most I did was postponing my second appointment for a few more weeks and pray that I have some actual problems to ask him, rather than just cancelling my second appointment. In my head, cancelling my appointment would disappoint my poor therapist greatly, and he's going to take it very personally and a sign that he isn't doing his job well. I could never impose that on someone if I could help it!

I utilised my time before my second appointment to do a deep-dive down my brain and kept digging for any self-improvement problems that I could work on, and realised that I do have lots of things I could potentially work on and ask about. In retrospect, I feel like this is what prompted my psychoanalysis of myself and thus the comeback of my anxiety with social interactions. 

I started finding a lot of character flaws in myself and although I subconsciously knew that it was always present, I felt like this time it was being analysed under a microscope and I start to see it in everyday things that I do and would start jotting down a whole dot point list of "Things I need to bring up with my therapist" on my Notes app.  

This vicious cycle of my self-awareness/self-reflection is further validated by my therapist, who agreed with my self-diagnosis and agreed that I do have these "traits" that he offered some amazing strategies for me to work on alleviating/cope with. While I'm in no way blaming my therapist for this spiral of bad thoughts, after the therapy session, I started reflecting on every single interactions that I had (even my therapy session) more closely than before, then berating myself for feeling that way/overthinking everything. As I started to turn the problems inwards, it became more often that I would always assume that "it was my fault/responsibility" for every negative interaction I had (e.g: someone being angry, or not in the mood for talking= They hate me and I've done something wrong). 

I don't know how to describe it, but I'm starting to have anxiety after the detailed self-diagnosis I made with myself, which is then confirmed by my therapist. While I do try to improve, every time I think I'm experiencing one of the "traits", I would hate myself and find myself so stupid/weak for feeling this way. 

This morning, I was listening to a random podcast episode called "Can you be too self-aware?" by The Psychology Sisters. It was then I realised what I've been feeling! They explained in the podcast that if you're too self-aware, you risk missing out on the present moment as all you're obsessed with doing is fixing yourself to be the most "perfect" version of yourself, and berating yourself when so many things that you're so determined to be fixed is actually part of human nature/human experience (for example, feelings of jealousy, guilt etc.) and are what makes us humans!

Society nowadays focus too much on self-improvement and being the best version of yourself, and while that's definitely a good thing, I could now see the flip side of the obsession of chasing better. There's nothing wrong with striving to be your best possible self, but it's also important to note that not all of your issues NEEDS fixing and that it's human nature to be feeling low, having negative thoughts etc. 

For reference if anyone wants to listen to said podcast episode: https://tinyurl.com/5n7exfnh✨