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DO YOU NEED SHRINKING? Therapy is most effective for basically healthy people who have been grazed—or hit smack in the heart—by one of the infinite arrows of outrageous fortune: trauma, persecution, rigid judgments, lost love. Whatever their cause, until treated by a skilled healer, emotional wounds can lame as badly as a broken limb. This isn't to say that every emotionally wounded person needs therapy. The human heart can be healed by any intimate connection with a psychologically savvy individual. Psychologist Alice Miller calls such people the "compassionate witnesses" of others' emotional experience. If you're blessed with one or more of them, you can survive devastating circumstances with relatively little psychological damage. In the absence of compassionate witnesses, however, even a relatively mild emotional injury can fester. When it comes to our hearts, the old adage isn't quite true: Time heals only those wounds that are shared and understood. There are literally thousands of diagnostic tests you could take to determine whether therapy might be useful to you. (I've included one you might want to try.) When you come right down to it, though, you have to answer only two questions to know whether counseling could improve your life:
If the answer to both these questions is yes, you don't really need psychotherapy (though you might still enjoy it). If you got one yes and one no, seeing the right therapist could vastly enhance your quality of life. If the answer to both questions is no—in other words, if you are not only suffering but suffering alone—you need and deserve what good therapy can give you. Find out if you could benefit from therapy with Martha Beck's diagnostic test. 
From the January 2003 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. Subscribe now!
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