I’ll start with a cliché: everyone’s problems are unique. The growing awareness of this fact is reflected even by the evolution of the American classification of diseases (DSM), which is becoming more descriptive, giving priority to the patient’s inner experience, not observable from the outside, “objective” criteria of “normality”.
So when should you reach out for help? When you want to. I do not consider that to do this you need to have a particularly powerful justification, (but still – awareness of your own motivation is quite useful). Since I do not know anything about you, I can only guess what brings you here. Experience and theory suggest me that you may:
- be struggling to identify yourself: who am I?, what do I want?, what do I need?,
- suffer from fears, which are stronger than your present ways of dealing with them,
- be curious about, how is it possible to constantly repeat the same mistake, perhaps even initiated by your ancestors (ie. choose people who cheat or drink for your life partners),
- lost faith in the meaning of life, (although if you’re searching for help, then it is clear to me that you didn’t lose your faith entirely),
- feel that you are worthless, even if you try so hard to be “somebody” (else),
- be reluctant to come to terms with a loss or separation,
- feel that life is about something more and I would like to finally experience it,
- have problems with putting borders, which has negative consequences (such as resentment, frustration, a sense of incomprehension)
- desire to better understand signals sent by your body, when it hurts, when it is tired, when you can not sleep or eat,
- desire to extricate yourself from involvement (most likely interpersonal), and fear of leaving,
- experience inability to express emotions or their uncontrolled outbursts,
- be unhappy and feel reluctant about/towards life,
- experience embarrassment in social situations that is so hurtful that you want to escape,
- lack spontaneous expression of joy and pleasure,
- want to learn more effective communication with people important for you,
- be inable to establish a stable and satisfactory, close relationship,
- fear that you’ll “go crazy”,
- be stressed out, overworked and have racing thoughts,
- have experienced trauma, traces of which still bother you to live peacefully,
- blaming yourself for making a wrong decision,
- concluded that you do not do what you truly want,
- feel confused and not understanding how it happened that you found yourself in such a psychologically difficult situation,
- … (something absolutely unique, yours, that didn’t cross my mind),
or maybe someone (eg. a doctor or someone close to you) suggested to you that psychotherapy could be a good idea for you.