Personal Growth Is For Everyone

Let’s start with the basics. What is personal growth?

It’s a vague term that’s easy to dismiss. It’s impossible to measure, so scientists, researchers, and mental health industry gatekeepers are often resistant to using it.

It’s not entirely a bad instinct to treat it with skepticism, as its elusive qualities make it rife for abuse as an empty marketing term. People with minimal skills or formal training can set themselves up as “personal growth coaches” and charge people hundreds of dollars for not much at all.

But personal growth is real, however hard to pin down it may be.

One thing that makes the process of personal growth a little vague is that it’s different for everyone. Sometimes it comes from learning a new skill or philosophy. Sometimes it comes from developing more courage or self-confidence. Sometimes, it comes from simply shedding the doubts that kept you from being who you really are in public.

While the process of personal growth can’t be measured, the result is nearly always a measurable change in how you live your life. That change can manifest as simply as finding a new hobby or as extravagantly as quitting your job, breaking up with your partner, and moving overseas to do something you’ve never done before.

Despite all these differences, there’s a common thread in all personal growth journeys: self-knowledge.

You might pride yourself in your timeliness, for example, when deep down, you resent how strict your schedule is. You might make excuses about why you’re in the job you’re in even though you hate it and dread going to work every day. Or you might think of yourself as just “a mom” or “a dad” when, while you love your kids, you know there’s more to your life—and you—than that.

Maybe you feel at odds with the person people praise you for being. Maybe you’re a “helper” who feels invisible in that role. Maybe you’re in a sexless marriage or a loveless relationship.

But on some level, you know it’s not fine. Maybe you’ve developed anxiety or depression. Maybe you’ve gotten caught by an addiction or compulsion that’s starting to harm you. Or maybe you simply have a vague sense that something isn’t right or that something is missing. But on some level, you know your life isn’t working and needs to change.

Psychology isn’t exactly short on theories about what causes personal growth. Most of these theories are based on the idea of the subconscious.

You can get walled off from your real thoughts and feelings for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones is other people. Even if they don’t say they think something is wrong with you, your friends, parents, and partners can react in ways that make you feel guilty or ashamed for feeling, thinking, talking, or acting the way you do.

Even if your family or home life is encouraging, the social pressures you encounter when you go to school or work can cause you to start shutting down.

Over time, the person other people know you as starts to diverge from the person you know—or once knew—yourself as being. Sometimes, you’re aware of it, but sometimes, you start to identify with your false self and forget who you really are. The result is that you lose touch with joy.

Therapists can help by guiding you to and through your subconscious. They can help you find the lost parts of you so you can put the puzzle of self back together. They can scare the monsters out of your mental closets and arm you with what you need to defeat them. They can guide you in your journey to uncover desires, passions, and dreams you buried so deeply it would have been almost impossible to find your way back to them on your own.

One of the most healing aspects of therapy is being known and accepted by your therapist. Your therapist is interested in and will embrace your whole self—including and especially the parts you hide from everyone else. What makes this possible is the special nature of the therapeutic relationship.

Good therapists are curious, empathetic, and want to help other people feel better. This, and the fact they don’t know or rely on you outside of the therapy office, allows them to regard with openness what other people resist or reject. Being able to be known like this by another person helps you know, and start to accept, yourself in the same way.

We believe personal growth is for everyone, but society might make you think otherwise:

• Insurance will cover therapy for the treatment of a mental health condition, but it won’t cover therapy for personal growth.
• Therapists who focus on personal growth tend to charge high rates and to not accept insurance.
• Retreats and workshops designed to help with personal growth can cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

The message you get when you start shopping for help to address your yearning to grow is that working on your personal growth is fine if you’re rich and have a lot of free time, but not if you’re a working person on a budget.

Screw that. We’re all here to grow as people, and at OpenCounseling, we think everyone should be able to get therapy to help them do just that.

We want people to think more broadly about what therapy can be. Therapy can help you answer your deepest questions, recover a sense of personal authenticity, and feel excited about life again. It can give you the tools to unlock your greatest potential and become the best possible version of yourself. And we want to help you learn how to do just that.

We’ve covered lots of different ways to find affordable therapy on our site. In general, we encourage people who have insurance—whether Medicaid, Medicare, or private insurance—to use it if they can, because co-pays are generally less than out-of-pocket rates. If there’s a good therapist who’s a good match in your insurance network, that’s often your best option.

We also encourage you to be creative and to explore all your local options for affordable therapy. Outside-of-the-box places to look for an affordable—or even free—therapist include university therapy or psychology departments, charitable or nonprofit organizations serving specific groups (such as veterans or trauma survivors), and your state’s public mental health system.

However, nearly all of these options have the same catch. They’re almost always focused on providing therapy to treat mental health conditions. Which is great if you have a mental health condition! But if you don’t, and just want to see a therapist to work on personal growth goals, you might not meet the criteria to be accepted by free or low-cost therapy programs in your area—and you probably won’t be able to use insurance to cover therapy. (We still encourage you to explore all these options before assuming a specific therapist or program isn’t an option for you.)

Sliding-scale therapists can be an excellent option if you’re looking for therapy for personal growth, but whether you can find a therapist who’s a good match and whose sliding scale is truly affordable depends on where you live and how lucky you are.

For this and other reasons, we believe this is where our sponsor, BetterHelp, can really help.

BetterHelp does not accept insurance, but for that reason, you won’t have to justify therapy as mental health treatment to use their service or to be able to qualify for financial aid or a discount. (In fact, their service is designed for people with mild to moderate issues and they may refer you elsewhere if you have a severe mental health condition or are in or at risk of a serious mental health crisis.)

And BetterHelp’s expansive roster of therapists can help you find someone who specializes in the methods or approaches to personal growth that will work best for you.

I won’t lie. When I signed up for BetterHelp, I was a little depressed, but not to the point I met criteria for a depressive disorder. I was seeking therapy for personal and spiritual growth. And the therapist I found through BetterHelp was—and is—an amazing match who has helped me grow. No one even remotely like her was available in my local community, and I doubt I’d still be in therapy, and still be getting so much out of it, if I hadn’t found her.

I signed up for BetterHelp before the pandemic. There are more online therapy options now. You can use search engines to find therapists who offer online therapy through their own websites or an independent platform (note that to be able to receive online sessions from a therapist, including on BetterHelp, your therapist has to be licensed to practice in the state where you live). Many community counseling agencies and public mental health programs are now using teletherapy, too.

But I won’t be surprised if signing up for online sessions with a BetterHelp therapist is still your most affordable option for therapy for personal growth.

Treating mental health conditions and working on personal growth goals can often be the same thing, but not always.

When you want to change specific aspects of your life, or even just suspect something isn’t quite right, it isn’t always because you have a mental health condition.

The good news is that you don’t have to know whether you do, because therapy can help either way. The bad news is that whether you meet criteria for a mental health condition can determine whether insurance covers your therapy or if you qualify for low-cost therapy programs in your area.

We want to help more people use therapy to find and become the best, happiest, versions of themselves.

And we know that one of the major barriers to therapy is cost. This is why we recommend and share information about many different ways to find affordable therapy, from seeking free therapy at a university counseling department to using the public mental health system to finding community clinics and sliding-scale therapists through our site’s database.

But in the particular case of finding affordable therapy for personal growth, we think online therapy companies like our sponsor, BetterHelp, can often be the best option.

Unlike restrictive insurance policies or grant-funded agencies with stringent eligibility criteria, BetterHelp doesn’t require you to fit a diagnosis to get affordable therapy through their platform.

So, if you don’t think you have a full-blown mental health condition, or aren’t sure whether you do, but are searching or yearning for something better, we encourage you to explore all of your options for affordable therapy and to be willing to give online therapy a try. It might just change your life!