Living the life you want to live and being the person you want to be demands hard work, I reminded myself

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recently read about a woman, a teacher by profession, whose life was in shambles. She was steeped in addiction, engaged in impulsive and dangerous behaviors, and felt a self-loathing so all-consuming that she couldn’t get out of her own way to consider her behavior. After one particularly destructive evening, she had a moment of clarity when she realized she needed to get a grip on herself. And over the next several weeks, she painfully transitioned from using self-harming behaviors to shield herself from painful feelings to experiencing them in all of their awful glory.

In recounting her journey, one of the things the teacher credited for her sustained recovery was a sign that she saw every day. Each day she would walk her third-grade class out to recess, and she’d deliberately walk them the longer way out in order to pass a colleague’s classroom. Her fellow teacher had a sign hanging on her wall that read, “We Can Do Hard Things.” The teacher drew inspiration from the poster, recognizing that this was a message she needed to internalize for a successful recovery.

Recovery doesn’t mean that life is easier. It means that we recognize our strength as human beings, and that come what may, we can surmount those challenges.

There is a curious misunderstanding that many have about psychotherapy: They assume that clients in therapy are looking for validation for why they can’t do better. This is patently false. I do not recall, at any point in my career, someone looking to me for this sort of validation. What I find rather is that the shame and guilt people feel about their struggles lead them to believe they aren’t capable of more. Even professionals who are literally experts in complex fields aren’t immune to this kind of subjective thinking. In therapy, when we challenge these mistaken beliefs, clients learn they are capable of so much more than they thought they were.

I’ll admit that being a therapist is often not easy. Being present with a patient who is resistant or hearing the traumas that people have come to work through is hard, and I’m often asked how I do what I do. I respond that I do exactly what I am asking my patients to do, and I have the same results, in my life and practice, that I preach they will. We model for our clients that doing hard things is rewarding.