Most people contact a psychotherapist after trying persistently to solve a painful problem without success. They want the “symptoms” of anxiety or depression or relationship problems, among others, to be ameliorated. They are looking for relief from pain and hoping the therapist will know what to do to help.
It usually doesn’t take long for people to realize that hard work is involved in psychotherapy. It tends to require an investment of money, time, and mental energy. What should you expect from your investment in psychotherapy?
One of the most important goals of any therapy is to help people, to the extent possible, reduce the painful “symptoms” that prompted them to call the therapist. However, once the panic attacks or the arguments with a spouse have stopped, is therapy over? In most instances the answer is no. For most people perhaps the most important goal of psychotherapy is to help them improve their life, not just reduce their symptoms. A good therapist will get to know you well enough to collaborate with you about what specific goals should be worked towards to improve your life.
Helping someone improve their life is a fairly vague goal. There are five key areas we consider with respect to improving life: Improving relationships, understanding personality, agency, managing feelings, and making meaning.
Improving Relationships
Humans are herd animals. We bond with our primary caregivers early in life and enjoy connections with romantic partners, friends, colleagues, and others across life. Psychotherapy is an important relationship in which the ways we relate to others can be reflected upon, understood, and improved. In psychotherapy, emotional intimacy and closeness is a frequent topic since barriers to connection are often a source of pain or strain in relationships. Improving how we relate is vital across life.
Similarly, sometimes the patterns of relating to important others we learn early in life are replicated in later relationships. Psychotherapy examines these relational patterns to find ways to improve our sense of safety and security in connection.
Psychotherapy also works toward creating connections that offer opportunity for interdependence. Interdependence allows us to ask for what we need and expect to reliably receive it while also giving to others what they need. These interchanges solidify the bonds we have with others and create a felt sense of love.
Understanding Personality
When we think of our personality, we tend to think of the qualities that make us who we are. If you’ve ever taken a personality “test,” you know that psychotherapists and researchers like to break the concept of personality into categories. For instance, maybe you’re more extroverted than introverted (two well known categories that one “test” uses to describe aspects of personality). When you get the results of your “test” you recognize the characteristics that make up your personality are not the same as everyone else’s. You are unique. Psychotherapy helps you understand the aspects of yourself that you don’t typically spend time reflecting upon. Knowing who you are (your sense of identity) is vital to understanding how you impact your world and how it impacts you.
Understanding your own personality also fosters an interesting phenomenon. Once we realize that we are unique, it is common to wonder how others’ minds work. If they are not like me, what are they like? How do they think and feel? What makes their perceptions different from my own? The ability to understand the personalities of others is key to navigating the world. Imagining how someone else sees something allows us to help them get what they need, encourage them, support them, and motivate them, among many other things.
Agency
Problems have a way of capturing our attention, even when we don’t want them to. Being able to take action during times of plenty as well as times of suffering can significantly improve life. Being able to create the life you want while realistically holding on to the limitations you face makes a huge difference. Psychotherapy aspires to help people take action to make life improving changes.
Creating the life you want, in a realistic way, is not always what we are able to focus on. Sometimes, life is tough. Having the agency to psychologically protect ourselves in tough times is not always easy or straight forward. Sometimes we overprotect ourselves or protect ourselves in ways that are not necessary. For example, sometimes you don’t need to argue with your partner about a trivial matter. It’s just not helpful. However, in the moment, it can seem like the most important thing to spend energy on. Psychotherapy examines the ways we protect ourselves from pain. This knowledge helps us know when our methods are useful and when they’re not. Then we can make choices about how we want to protect ourselves moving forward.
The ability to act, especially persistently, is extremely helpful to people in general. Many of life’s problems are solved by sustained action over time. Psychotherapy helps people to stay focused on solving problems. And, it also helps people put into perspective how much energy or action might be required to accomplish something important. Being realistic about the size of a problem and what will be required to overcome it is one way to build resilience.
Manage Feelings
We all know that feelings are complex and we’ve all dealt with complex feelings of our own or others. Like other parts of life like sleep or eating, and whether we realize it or not, we all attempt to regulate our feelings. This is an ongoing process. Sometimes we over-regulate feelings by trying to push them away too much or we under-regulate our feelings when we are overrun by them. Most of the time, we are not aware of how or when we are managing our feelings; it just happens in the background of our minds.
How we manage our feelings can have a profound impact on our experience of everyday life. It can impact our relationships, what we believe we can accomplish in life, and the meanings we make of life. Psychotherapy tends to look at the myriad ways we attempt to cope with the feelings related to problems in life. By exploring how we regulate our feelings, we can determine which “defenses” serve us best (provide the most benefit with the least cost) to a given moment.
Understanding what seems like the hidden language or logic of emotion can be incredibly helpful in everyday life. When your child is screaming about not being able to eat chocolate before dinner, having some basic understanding about what they are feeling can go a long way toward improving what could be a difficult moment. Psychotherapy helps us study our feelings, learn how they work and what they mean, and helps us use them for good.
In fact, the language of emotion can significantly impact how we make meaning of life. Emotions can be vital in making decisions and acting in the world. Have you ever had a bit of anxiety around someone only to hear days later that they were involved in some nefarious behavior? Paying attention to the feeling to make the decision to stay away from someone can be lifesaving.
Meaning Making
Psychotherapy is a process in which we reflect on all aspects of life. That reflection is meant to help us understand how our minds work and how our relationships work. And, as a result of that reflection, we come to understandings of ourselves and others that make life more meaningful and purposeful.
That reflection is also important in that it helps us to identify our values. For much of our lives, we live under the standards others have fashioned for us. Psychotherapy helps us to live by the values that are most potent and meaningful to us. Being able to internalize what is most important to us and live out those values in our actions can create not only a sense of integrity but also depth of purpose in life. We stop simply following rules and start pointing our lives in the directions we find meaningful.
Ultimately, this process supports and encourages us to find purpose in our lives. In these places of reflection, we begin to form a sense of legacy in which we think about how to give beyond our own needs and look beyond our mortality.
So, what should you expect from psychotherapy? There is no life that is pain-free but there can be a reduction in pain. In addition to that, psychotherapy works to help people improve their relationships, understand their own minds, strengthen their agency, manage and understand their feelings, and help them make meaning in life.