Therapy what’s it all about?
People may develop a number of different avoidance strategies, to cope, to avoid pain; to manage on a day-to-day level. Avoidance only lasts so long; when that happens, then it's very overwhelming, and it's understandably scary.
The goal of therapy is to help clients address and change the problems that brought them into treatment; for each individual to work with the therapist how to deal with negative thoughts and feelings and make positive changes.
The positive relationship between the therapist and client is commonly referred to as the therapeutic alliance.
Talking therapies gives people the chance to explore their thoughts and feelings and the effect they have on their behaviour and mood. Describing what is going on in your head and how that makes you feel can help you notice any patterns which it may be helpful to change.
It can help you work out where your negative feelings and ideas come from and why they are there.
Understanding all this can help people make positive changes by thinking or acting differently. Talking therapies can help people to take greater control of their lives and improve their confidence.
Talking therapies may also be referred to as:
talking treatments
counselling
psychological therapies or treatments
psychotherapies
Together, the client will hopefully link the way they were thinking, feeling and behaving to what might have gone on when they were younger
Psychotherapy can be life-changing.
It is clients’ active participation in therapy through their involvement, learning and application of what they learn that leads to improvement. Clients undergoing therapy don’t do this work on their own but in collaboration with their therapist. The quality of the collaborative relationship is an enormously important contributor to good therapy outcomes.
In a good collaboration, both therapist and client work at maintaining a positive relationship and need to continuously respond and adjust to the other, much like dance partners working in synchrony do.
Regardless of modality or therapist; confidentiality will be discussed prior to starting sessions. Acceptance of when a therapist must disclose is important. The intent around the conversation about confidentially is to make sure you feel safe knowing that you can talk about anything that’s on your mind, while also letting you know that there are specific times, especially when it comes to you or someone else being in physical danger, that it is the therapist’s duty and legal responsibility to communicate to keep everyone safe.
Therapy should feel like a safe, comfortable space where you can say anything. And that includes if you don't understand something, if your therapist annoys you, if you disagree with something they said, or if you're fearful of what he or she will say. It is important for the therapist to understand the client’s experiences to help them better.
Just like your workouts, sometimes you'll be really excited going to therapy and sometimes you'll loathe it, change is hard. It will be uncomfortable at times, but it's part of the process to get you to where you want to be.
So, it's not minute-after-minute or session-after-session of deep, hard work.
Sometimes the sessions when you think you have nothing to talk about lead to the biggest breakthroughs.