How will therapy help me?
Four ways in which seeing a counsellor can benefit you.
While more and more people are finding their way to therapist’s offices, counselling and psychotherapy still carries a certain stigma and can often be misunderstood, even by those who seek it. Your counsellor or a psychotherapist won’t have the answers to all your burning questions about life’s intricacies and challenges (more about that in my last blog), but therapy can lead to a lot of growth and healing. Here are 4 of the main areas in which I see my clients benefit and how therapy can help you too.
Skills and strategies for coping with life’s challenges
Most clients arrive for their first session with a bag of learnt ways of coping with life’s challenges. Humans have an amazing ability to adjust to their environment in order to have our needs met and to survive. These adjustments usually serve us really well for a while, but most of them have an expiry date and start to cause trouble at some point in our life. Perhaps you learnt to please others or take on responsibilities that aren’t yours in order to feel valued and worthy. Maybe you use food or substance to help you disconnect from uncomfortable feelings and to fill a sense of emptiness. Or you may have built an entire identity around a role you had been given in your family, but didn’t necessarily choose and now you don’t know who you are. Therapy can help you understand why these creative adaptations may have been needed in the past and how they impact your present. From that awareness you can then explore new ways of supporting yourself.
This may involve learning about the importance of emotions and adopting healthy ways to process them. You’ll gain an understanding of your triggers. You’ll learn to read your body’s cues for when you need to regulate your nervous system and get better at doing it. You’ll learn how to set healthy boundaries, communicate assertively and much more. These skills will become a toolbox you get to take with you everywhere you go. You won’t need to talk to your therapist every time there is an obstacle to overcome. You will build up your confidence in tackling them yourself.
Improved relationships (starting with the one with yourself)
As clients become more aware of what lies underneath their struggles and gain some of the above skills, they are better equipped to engage in their relationships outside of therapy in an authentic, honest, caring and compassionate way. They learn to understand when something about others’ responses triggers an old wound in them. Because they are now able to recognise what's happening and they have the tools to support themselves, they are less likely to become reactive. Where in the past they would, for instance, lash out in anger or feel powerless and step into the victim role, they are able to choose their responses - at least most of the time. They are also able to be kinder to themselves when such triggers still cause a strong reaction. This means less shame, guilt and self-blame and more room for connection with others rather than withdrawal from relationships, which leads to feelings of loneliness and isolation.
Often when we become reactive, there is more to our story than what it seems. We may find it difficult to speak up, because our opinions were always dismissed when we were growing up. Or we may be carrying around a lot of anger that we were never allowed to fully experience and process even though it was (and perhaps still is) valid. Such experiences can cause us to react to the projections of our past in the present. Therapy helps with unpacking how your past is impacting the present. It can help you become aware of some of the beliefs you hold about your relationships and the roles you play in them. It will assist you in seeing new possibilities for how others may perceive you. Clients often discover what lies underneath their struggles to communicate openly. The therapeutic relationship provides an opportunity for healing and learning new ways to approach relationships. This leads to feelings of closeness and the deepening of connections with others in clients’ lives.
Increased self-esteem
As clients open up in therapy, they get to know themselves better, learn to understand how they’ve become the person they are now and start developing a stronger sense of self. A part of this process involves exploring how different parts of ourselves make us whole. Discovering that the different parts have their important roles, helps us appreciate them and become more accepting of ourselves. Therapy provides a place where clients can be fully seen without any judgement. This helps them be less judgmental of themselves and start developing a kinder internal dialogue as they progress.
Through their work with their counsellor, clients become more aware of their choices and how these serve them. Therapy helps them learn to hear what their body is telling them through feelings and sensations. They begin to trust their instincts more and turn inwards for guidance rather than seeking it from the outside world. Their sense of validation starts to be drawn from within rather than looking for it in others and they gain a greater sense of autonomy. Success and achievements based on our own choices lead to increased confidence and self-esteem as these can be really owned as ours.
Improved physical health
Many clients not only share increased emotional and mental well-being, it’s also their physical health that improves as a result of regular counselling or psychotherapy. Often as we learn new ways of processing our emotions, we no longer feel the need to suppress them and they don’t end up stored in our body. Being able to acknowledge our emotions as they arise, allow them to be present and release them in a helpful way contributes to lower stress levels, which supports our heart health and immune system. Suppressed emotions and trauma can also reside in our body and present as frequent or chronic pain and other physical symptoms that often improve with therapy. Difficulty sleeping and fatigue are symptoms that many clients report when they first start counselling. Energy levels and physical activity often increases as clients process what’s been “weighing them down”. Sleep is not only believed to be one of the most important health determinants, it is connected to many other areas of our well-being such as our emotional and mental health. This connection goes both ways and we often see improvement in sleep and sleeping habits as clients become more equipped to face life’s challenges and learn to treat themselves well along the way.
Therapy won’t just be helpful if you find yourself having difficulty in one (or more) of the four above mentioned areas. Counselling and psychotherapy is a space dedicated to yourself. Often we don’t quite know what’s troubling us. We might just feel like life has become tedious, we don’t know where we’re going or we’re feeling stuck. We may be feeling overwhelmed, while there’s a story in our head about how we “should be able to manage” and “have nothing to complain about”. Whatever is going on for you, having a safe space to explore your experience with the support of a trained professional will help you make sense of things and find more ground under your feet from which to tackle life.
