Why Therapy Isn’t a Last Resort — It’s a Way Back to Yourself

Derek Colvin
Aug 3, 2025
4 min read

By Derek Colvin, LPC-S — The Giant Therapist

For a lot of people, therapy feels like a last resort. Something you turn to when everything else has failed — when the arguments won’t stop, the anxiety won’t let up, or the distance in your relationship feels unfixable. But therapy was never meant to be the place you crawl to after you’ve hit bottom. It’s meant to be a space where you come home to yourself — slowly, honestly, and without the pressure to have it all figured out. I’ve been a therapist long enough to see that people don’t come in because they’re broken. They come in because they’ve outgrown the way they’ve been surviving. Therapy is where you begin to understand why you do what you do — and start choosing something different.

The quiet work of individual therapy

Individual therapy isn’t about fixing what’s “wrong.”It’s about getting curious about how you became who you are. Every pattern — the overthinking, the pleasing, the avoiding — once made sense. It kept you safe in environments that didn’t know how to hold your emotions. But as life changes, those old patterns start to suffocate you. In therapy, we trace those roots back. Not to live in the past, but to understand the emotional logic behind it — to see that what feels like “self-sabotage” is often just old protection trying to do its job. When clients begin to see that, something powerful happens. The shame starts to lift. They stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking, “What’s happening inside of me?”

That’s where growth begins — not in judgment, but in awareness.

Couple therapy: learning to see each other again

Couple therapy isn’t just about communication skills or conflict management. Those things matter, but they’re not the heart of the work. At its core, couples therapy is about helping two people see each other clearly again — not through the lens of defensiveness, fear, or exhaustion, but through understanding. Many couples come in saying, “We can’t communicate.”But what I often see underneath that is, “We don’t feel safe enough to be honest.” My job isn’t to referee arguments — it’s to slow them down until each partner can hear what the other is actually trying to say beneath the noise: “I miss you.” “I feel invisible.” “I’m scared we won’t get back to what we used to be.” That’s not weakness. That’s longing. And when that longing is met with empathy instead of defensiveness, repair begins. Couple therapy creates space for that — for remembering how to be allies again, not opponents.

Self-awareness: the bridge between past and present

Everything in therapy — individual or relational — circles back to self-awareness.Not the intellectual kind that says, “Yeah, I know I do that,” but the felt kind that says, “Oh… I feel what happens inside me when that moment repeats.”

Self-awareness isn’t just insight; it’s integration. It’s when you stop reacting to the past as if it’s still happening right now. It’s when you realize the fight you’re having with your partner isn’t really about the dishes — it’s about the feeling of being unseen that started long before this relationship. And when you can hold that awareness with compassion instead of shame, something inside you begins to settle. That’s what I mean when I say therapy is a way home — not back to who you were, but back to who you’ve always been beneath the noise.

Let’s talk about the stigma

Somewhere along the way, our culture decided that therapy was only for people who were “struggling.”But if you think about it, what could be more human than wanting to understand yourself better? We don’t wait until our cars are totaled to get a tune-up. We don’t wait until we’re dehydrated to drink water. Yet we wait until our relationships are on fire to reach out for help. The truth is, therapy isn’t about weakness. It’s about courage — the courage to stop pretending you’re fine when you’re exhausted from keeping it together. It’s the choice to stop running from what hurts and start listening to what it’s trying to teach you. That shift — from shame to curiosity — changes everything.

Finding the right therapist

If you’ve been thinking about therapy but don’t know where to start, here’s what I tell people:

Find someone you feel safe with. You’ll know within a few minutes whether you can exhale in their presence.
Pay attention to how you feel in the room. You should feel understood, not analyzed.
Look for depth, not just technique. A therapist’s tools matter, but their capacity to sit with you in what’s uncomfortable matters more.
Be honest about your goals. Whether you want to repair your marriage, heal from trauma, or understand why you keep choosing the same patterns, therapy works best when you’re willing to show up honestly — even if you’re not sure how yet.

If you’re new to therapy, the first session might feel awkward. That’s okay. Healing rarely feels comfortable at first. But over time, that space becomes sacred.

The invitation

Therapy isn’t just about solving problems. It’s about creating space for transformation.

It’s about learning to see yourself and the people you love with softer eyes. It’s about letting go of the illusion that healing means “getting over it” and realizing that real healing is learning to live more fully with it. So if you’ve been waiting for the “right time,” or telling yourself things aren’t bad enough yet, consider this your invitation. You don’t have to wait until it’s unbearable to begin the work. You can start now, exactly where you are.

Therapy isn’t the last step. It’s the first step back to yourself.