"Give me some tools, Doc!"

When I was a kid, I had an old snowmobile - a 1971 Ski-Doo, to be exact. It was a lovely and fickle machine. It seemed to take great joy in breaking down as soon as I got as far away from home as I wanted to go. I was always working on this thing, trying to get it to run properly and consistently. But alas, the mechanical problems were too deep and complex for me to fix on my own. 

To get the snowmobile started, I would often use a product called Starting Fluid. This fluid was a highly flammable liquid that you could spray directly into the carburetor to get the engine to fire quickly. And this stuff worked so well! One spray in the carburetor, one pull of the pull cord, and the snowmobile would fire up like a champ! The problem is that once the starting fluid burned off, the engine would go back to its normal poor functioning. The starting fluid didn’t fix the deeper problem with the snowmobile engine. It just helped it seem like it was functioning properly for a few seconds. 

You probably see where I’m going here. A lot of us seek out therapy because we feel like there’s something wrong with the way we’re functioning. It could be anxiety or depression. Perhaps we’re having a hard time regulating our anger. And we want relief from what we are feeling! 

Sometimes, it seems like what we most need is a kind of psychological “starting fluid.” Some tool to jump start our psyche so that we can trick our brains into working normally again. 

Although I completely empathize with the desire to find some kind of tool to help me get back to normal functioning, I think there’s also an inherent problem with this course of action. Just like my snowmobile, the tricks don’t last. They may help us ward off a painful bout of symptoms, but they aren’t able to address the deeper issues. 

Good therapy is holistic in nature. It may provide you with a few “tools” to prompt emotional health, but the main purpose of a working therapeutic relationship will always be the deeper and unconscious processes that are producing the symptoms. 

Just like starting fluid is an important tool to help get an old snowmobile started, it is not something that is designed to be sustainable. It has a limited and important purpose, but ultimately, with the help of a trained mechanic, the goal is to get the snowmobile functioning normally so that the starting fluid trick isn’t necessary. 

The same is true with our psyche. Tools will help relieve symptomology while we take the time to explore our unconscious world and understand why the symptoms exist in the first place. And then, through the miracle of psychotherapy, we can grow to the point that we don’t need tools. 

At least that’s the hope!