I’m a believer in therapy. Real therapy. With a good therapist. (Not all therapists are good.) Why do I believe in it?

Therapy teaches us how to understand the life we’re actually living—and how to stop making the same painful mistakes. (If we choose to. Some of us just love to keep the old patterns!)

Here are some of the things I learned.

1. We can’t control other people’s behavior.

We can explain our feelings perfectly, love someone deeply, set every reasonable boundary and still not be able to make another person change. People only change when they want to. And not everyone wants to.

That can be a painful realization. Especially when we make the most logical case possible for change, which is what I do. I mean, pretty useless in many cases..

Maybe like me, you’ve spent enormous amounts of energy trying to manage other people’s reactions, moods, choices and opinions. The great thing about therapy is that it can help us see that our real power lies elsewhere: in deciding what we will accept, how we will respond and when we will walk away.

Walking away. I’ve always been so bad at that.

2. Not everything is about us.

Someone’s anger may have more to do with their own history than with our worth.  Someone’s withdrawal may reflect their own fear. Their criticism may reveal their own insecurities. In fact, these things are almost always true.

Therapy has helped me develop enough emotional distance to stop automatically translating everything other people do into a verdict about myself. Not every silence is rejection. Not every disagreement is abandonment. Not every disappointment means we have done something wrong.

Sometimes people are simply being people. Oh, and it’s usually about them. Not us.

3. Boundaries aren’t punishments.

Many of us were taught that being a good person means being accommodating, available and understanding. In that scenario, saying no can feel selfish.

Therapy has shown me that a boundary is not about controlling someone else. It is about being clear about what I will and will not participate in.

Here’s what I’ve learned: You can love someone and still say no. You can forgive someone and still keep your distance. You can understand why someone behaves badly without volunteering to be hurt by it.

I’m a big believer in boundaries.

4. Our feelings are real, but they aren’t always facts.

Feeling unwanted doesn’t necessarily mean we are unwanted.  Feeling like a failure doesn’t mean we’ve failed.Feeling abandoned doesn’t necessarily mean someone has abandoned us.

Therapy can teach us to pause between the feeling and the conclusion. The feeling isn’t always the fact.

Instead of immediately believing the story our emotions are telling us, we can ask ourselves about it.

Why does this hurt so much?

What am I assuming?

Is this about what is happening now—or does it touch something much deeper and much older?

That pause can change everything.

5. We are allowed to become someone different.

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of therapy is realizing that the person we had to become in order to survive isn’t necessarily the person we must remain.

The people-pleaser can learn that it’s ok to disappoint people. In fact, most of us do from time to time. The caretaker can learn to receive. Because the equation runs both ways. The angry person can learn what is underneath the anger and not just react..

The person who always needs to be needed can learn that their worth doesn’t depend on being indispensable. Oh, now that’s a big one.

And the person who has spent years blaming themselves can finally begin to offer themselves some compassion. The most powerful therapeutic act I’ve ever done is give myself grace and compassion.

But look, I’m not saying that therapy erases our history.

But it can help us stop living as though our history is our destiny. Because it isn’t.

Maybe that is where healing starts. It’s not becoming someone who never gets hurt, never gets angry, never makes mistakes or never struggles.

It’s becoming someone who understands myself well enough to make different choices.

And sometimes, after all those years of trying to change everyone and everything around us, we discover the person we had the most power to change was ourselves.

Those are some of my lessons. What are some of yours?