What is Therapy | Benefits of Therapy

Celebrate LOVE with us on Excuse Me Doctor as we explore the role of therapy in enhancing self-love, the foundation of healthy relationships. Monday 9PM ET/ 6PM PT. Dr. Mel is join by psychiatrist Dr Delvena Thomas and Mental Health Advocate Mark Harrison

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Question: Can you start off by defining self-love for us?

Dr. Delvina Thomas: There are so many layers to self-love. Self-love first starts with, I believe self-confidence, and self-awareness of who you are. Awareness means you acknowledge what you’re good at and what you need help with, and what you could do better. Oftentimes people struggle in acknowledging what they struggle with or they struggle with acknowledging what they don’t know. It’s important to be able to acknowledge all of those things because it will prevent you from allowing yourself to be caught up in some sort of problem or conundrum because you’re not self-aware. So self-love includes self-awareness, self-confidence, self-esteem and it also just includes the fact that you acknowledge that your brain is the strongest part of your body. There’s a term that I coined called brain love. And so self-love is being able to embrace brain love and know that you have to take care of your brain. You have to take care of yourself.

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Question: You mentioned the brain is the strongest part of our body. Can you elaborate on that?

Dr. Delvina Thomas: Without your brain, you can’t do anything. Your brain controls everything that you do. It controls our blinking, our talking, our emotions, our walking, the way we react to someone, how fast we react to someone, how slowly we react to a situation. Everything is controlled by the brain. Loving someone is really controlled by the brain. Although some people allow other parts of the body to take over and tell you whether you should love someone or not. But the brain is really what you should rely on when you’re making those types of decisions. So without your brain, we have nothing because everything gets coordinated up here. Everything gets coordinated in this control center – is what I call it.

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Question: What is therapy and how can it help to address some of the issues that we’ve been talking about – things perpetuated generationally?

Dr. Delvina Thomas: So therapy is being your authentic self. It’s a professional interaction with

a person who’s trained to conduct a dialogue with you in such a way that it’s enlightening. It becomes insightful. And it helps you to find your own path to your own solutions. Therapy is not telling you what to do. Therapy is not teaching you what to do. Therapy is not a dictatorship. It’s not someone telling you, this is what you’ll do. And this is how you’ll do it. It’s helping you to understand dynamics and things and understand yourself so that you can arrive at healthy decision-making. Therapy doesn’t work though, if you show up at the office and you’re not authentic, if you’re not honest, if you’re not putting it all on the table. So when you go, when you decide to venture down that road, you have to be prepared to be vulnerable, to expose yourself.