Finding Motivation When You Have None
I’ve been a counselor for a year and some change. Before becoming a counselor, I was an intern, before that I was in graduate school, and before that, I was trying to recover from an eating disorder. Put all this life experience together and we are looking at about seventeen years of living with, learning about, and working with those recovering from mental illness.
Over the years I have learned that recovering from mental illness requires us to do things that we don’t want to do, or rather, don’t feel like doing. Recovering from depression means we have to get out of bed, shower, reach out to people, etc even when we feel sluggish and heavy. Recovering from anxiety means we have to expose ourselves to the things that scare us even when it makes our heart race and armpits sweat. Recovering from an eating disorder means you have to eat an adequate amount of food with adequate variety even when you are terrified of your body changing. I could go on.
In therapy, we call this acting opposite of our emotions (or Opposite Emotion) because we know that down the road it will start to make us feel better. However, to do things that we don’t want to do, we need to have motivation, right? Or maybe, the answer isn’t so simple.What Happens Without Motivation?
Whenever I am sitting with a client whose progress in therapy is stagnant, I think about this quote.
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