Overview of Therapy

Many of my clients have been in therapy before, but many have not. Regardless of which category you fall into, therapy is different with each person and each therapist.  The purpose of therapy is to make positive changes in your life. This is accomplished with several steps that aren’t necessarily in order.

Insight Building

Discover areas that are causing pain, frustration, sadness, anxiety, and general trouble.  These can be anything from minor annoyances to very serious issues. Examples (of which these are just a very small amount of possibilities) include lack of direction in life, contemplating or going through a divorce, losing a loved one, or being depressed. Regardless of what you’re going through right now that you feel you may need help with, the first step is always the same: figuring out what the problem is. This is true for anything in life, from work, to physical problems, to relationship problems. When a business is not doing well or wants to make improvements, they have the same approach… figure out what isn’t working or what needs improvement. The same holds true for therapy.

Plan out how to change the issues.

Once we find areas to work on (which is an ongoing process), we need to create a plan to change them. For instance, if the problem is depression, we need to find what that means to you, what you feel your unique contributing factors are, and subsequently what areas we need to target for change. If your depression stems from a lack of meaningful relationships, we can create a plan to find and support new relationships. Part of this will probably include what is causing the issues with finding meaningful relationships and changing the underlying systems.

Make a change.

Once the plan is created, we start to make changes by taking the first step. I like to use the approach of mini-changes, or colloquially “baby steps”. There’s no need to tackle a problem in a day, week, or even month (depending on the problem). Some problems are just too big to tackle in giant leaps and bounds. That’s like trying to solve a complicated math problem by just jumping to the answer or writing an essay by only having an intro and conclusion paragraph.

Monitor change.

Once the plan is in place and enacted, we need to monitor how the plan is going. Sometimes the first plan doesn’t work and we need to make adjustment, and sometimes it works perfectly the first time. Regardless of which it is we need to make sure we keep track of progress.

Rinse and repeat.
These steps may need repeated, adjusted, or ended. Most clients have more than one issue going on at once and that may take multiple progressions through these steps.

What to expect during a session.

Typical sessions are 45-50 minutes. The first session is usually a “getting to know you” session that involves gathering information and getting an overview of what’s going on in your life (Step 1 above). After the first session, most of the following ones have a somewhat consistent pattern. We talk about progress during the prior week, areas for improvement or change, and finally homework. I know, homework isn’t the word anyone wants to hear, but it is a necessary part of therapy. Much like school, if you show up, listen, and participate you will get something out of it. However, if you don’t take home what’s talked about and practice it, apply it, and really take it to heart there’s going to be stunted progress.

Confidentiality.

Everything that’s said in the room stays in the room with a few exceptions. The main ones are if you are suicidal or homicidal. As an example, suicidal doesn’t usually mean “ugh, sometimes I just get so frustrated that I feel like I can’t take it”. More than likely it’s along the lines of “I have a plan to hurt or kill myself and I’m going to do it later”. Essentially, it’s a significant threat to yourself (or others in the case of homicidal). The other main one is any abuse to a child or elderly person. I, and any therapist, am required by law to report this. A minor one, as we covered above, is if the insurance company audits my records. Finally, in some instances the legal system has a right to my records, but this is very rare.

I want you to feel comfortable sharing whatever is going on in your life without fear that other people will find out and possibly judge you. The sessions are a safe place to share and not be judged. Unless you want me to, I don’t share anything with spouses, family members, friends, clergy, etc.

There’s so much more to therapy that it’s hard to put it in writing, but if you’re serious about wanting to make changes in your life, therapy is an excellent choice.