How can therapy help you improve the quality of your life?
Why do people go to therapy? There are so many reasons but to put it concisely: to improve their quality of life. This may be obvious, but how therapy helps might not be so clear. Let’s break it down.
When people are starting therapy for the first time, generally speaking, it’s because something in their life is not going well and they’d like it to be better. They may be struggling with anxiety, depression, or substance abuse. They may be having a hard time in intimate relationships. It can be stress from work or ongoing family conflict. The list goes on. As the reasons people begin therapy can vary, the way that therapy can help also varies. This then begs the question, what are you hoping to gain or improve in therapy?
Do you want to change how you think, feel, or behave? Do you want to know yourself better? Do you want to develop psychological skills? Are you looking for emotional support and an outlet to talk? Are you in need of a healthy relationship that helps you consider different perspectives, challenges you, and helps you grow as a person?
It is every counsellors job to listen, to show genuine interest and care regarding whatever it is you share. Beyond that, a therapist can assume the role of a teacher, a coach, a guide, a healer, an expert, or an analyzer. Most therapists can shift from one role to another within a session depending on their style and the modalities they use.
This is why it’s so helpful to understand what you want from therapy. It may be surprising but many people that come to therapy don’t know the answer to that question and they likely do not know which one of those roles they’d prefer their Counsellor to operate from. To help answer this big question, we can describe five areas that therapy can help with and what role a therapist would need to adopt to help in this way. Moreover, for clarity, to reduce overwhelm, read this to discover what you may want from therapy. We’ll cover five areas that are common in therapy: emotional support, psychological skills, self-understanding, change, and healing.
First, emotional support. Sometimes we just need to talk and have someone truly listen. We need a person that is not going to try to immediately make things better or one up us. We need someone who can show us that they hear what we are saying, that they see our suffering, that they understand. Counsellors are trained to do this. What’s more, Counsellors are in this profession because they have a deep desire to listen and to understand. Your Counsellor can come to know you deeply, they can get to know your story from the beginning to present day. You can have the opportunity to explore pivotal times in your life, impactful experiences, and private thoughts and feelings that you may not feel comfortable talking about with anyone else. For this reason, therapy is a tremendous outlet and space for emotional support. It is a space to be truly heard and understood, and that is therapeutic. Your Counsellor can be in the role of a healer as they hold space and offer compassionate understanding which is healing.
Second, psychological skills. There are proven methods to improve mental health. From ancient practices like meditation to modern strategies like box breathing, there are ways to foster inner-peace and self-regulate. In therapy, your Counsellor can teach you many specific skills to help with whatever it is you're struggling with. Things you can use in the moment to ground yourself, like the 5-4–3-2-1 senses skill or skills like visualization that you can practice on a regular basis to improve performance or confidence in given tasks or situations. You can learn self-talk techniques to help you cope with intrusive thoughts like the phrase “I’m having the thought that I am weak”, rather than identifying with it directly “I am weak”. These skills have been proven to be effective, in research and in practice. With any skill, it becomes more effective the more you practice it. Your Counsellor can be in the role of a teacher, a coach, or an expert as they help you learn and implement skills.
Third, know yourself. Therapy is a space to tell your story and to be guided to explore your life in greater depth. Counsellors can help you go deeper by asking great questions, providing insight, connecting dots, offering different perspectives, challenging assumptions, and reflecting back to you the meaning of what you’ve shared. Counsellors can offer succinct summaries, identify themes, and relate past experiences to current thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. All of this helps us to know ourselves better. In this, your counsellor may shift between the roles of a guide or an analyzer.
Fourth, change. Many people who come to therapy want change. That can be internal, such as changing how you habitually think or feel. It can be external, such as relationship dynamics, different outcomes in sport or work, or behaviour change. We might hope that therapy can help us improve our sleep or get rid of our panic attacks. These changes can require different modalities or strategies from the therapist. It can take the form assisting in goal setting and developing behavioural activation strategies. It can be sharing resources and tools that are proven to help. Your therapists may help you discover what motivates you, your counsellor may help with accountability, your counsellor may offer strategies. Your Counsellor may step into the role of a coach, a teacher, or an expert depending on what the situation calls for.
Fifth, healing. People often come into therapy deep in suffering or carrying wounds from their past that they want to heal. The suffering can be difficult to understand and the wounds can be well beneath the surface. It can be very challenging to discover the source of suffering, to identify where, when, why, and how the wounds occurred. Sometimes people are very familiar with the sources of suffering or how they were wounded, but can be lost as to how they may be able to heal. As described above, the process of self-exploration and self-understanding, being truly heard, seen, and understood can be healing. Beyond this, Counsellors are often trained in proven and empirically supported methods to facilitate healing. An example of this is Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy which has been shown to improve symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In Internal Family Systems therapy, Counsellors can help clients unload burdens they carry from past wounds and heal in a deep and meaningful way. In this, Counsellors are in the role of a healer, helping to facilitate the healing that comes from the client’s work in therapy.
Did we cover everything? Definitely not. There is so much work that can be done in therapy. You can improve your relationships, heal from past hurt, change in meaningful ways, access your strength, develop helpful strategies, gain useful skills, and more . There is really no limit to your potential and therapy can help you realize it.
-Robbie
