How I Got the Most Out of Therapy
Therapy is a laborious process, but I’ve come up with a few ways that made it much easier on me and increased its effectiveness in my life.
That’s not the way people tend to talk about it. Instead, the go to phrase from anyone that cares revolves around going to therapy to fix yourself right up. The way people talk about it implies that it’s like going to the doctor. Make an appointment, get some help, and “bam!” you’re all better.
A trusting relationship is critical.
One of the most important parts of a therapeutic relationship, in my opinion, is trust. That trust includes both in the abilities of the therapist and in the drive to bare all to them. If that component can’t be established, the effectiveness of therapy can be severely hampered.
Both of these things grow with time, but I have found that the trust to tell a therapist everything came quickly if it came at all. It is the most important thing that we, as patients, can nurture and feed off of. In many cases, even trusted friends aren’t told every detail of the dark things, but your therapist should be the one person nothing is held back from.
The entire point of therapy is to fix the patient. If you or I aren’t honest about what’s going on or sharing all of the details, it can be very hard for even the best therapists to provide the perfect tools for the presenting issues. They’re not there to judge the oddity you want to withhold.
I have struggled with this.
There have been therapists that I haven’t felt comfortable sharing everything with. Needless to say, therapy with them never seemed to produce many results. I fully believe they knew I was holding back, and holding myself back, but they can’t make you speak. That sort of relationship sometimes required a change in providers, and that was a perfectly acceptable course of action.
At other times I have been embarrassed by what I have to say or am embarrassed that I wasn’t able to correctly use a coping mechanism or through process we discussed. This can be even more damaging than withholding information about problems. If they don’t know something doesn’t work, they don’t know to offer another option.
A therapist is not a source of judgement, but a source of constructive statements to help with those moments of embarrassment. To hold on to those statements and failings is to hold on to the embarrassment. Once I was able to overcome that fear with the knowledge that they were there to help, it became much easier to find effective strategies.
I have learned that you should be able to tell your therapist everything.
Start using a journal.
No, I don’t mean you have to spend time each night writing down every detail of your day or any other part of the stereotypical journal conception that floats around. If you do, that’s fine. It’s not what I’m after though.
Record key moments in life between sessions.
Instead, use it to record events and feelings that are of significance between therapy sessions. These things that happen to us and the things we feel are the core component of therapy, and they all happen outside of your appointments. The reason for writing them down is for memory.
I always had trouble, especially on two to four week spans, remembering many of the events that I knew were significant by the time I got back to a therapy session. I would sit in the therapy session, with next to nothing to talk about, with the nagging feeling I was forgetting something.
Even if forgetting the events themselves isn’t an issue, we are not always the best at remembering all of the details of those events. Writing it out in a journal while it’s fresh and full of detail can allow you to capture all of the key information that could change the entire view of the situation in therapy.
When you walk into therapy, your life between sessions is readily available for dissection. As a note, I would recommend reviewing your notes in the lobby before your appointment. If you don’t you may spend too much of your session reading it and not enough time talking about it.
Write out coping mechanism and thought processes.
A very important component of therapy comes in the form of “homework” that you’ll take out of the session and into life. These vary in type but two common things are coping mechanisms and constructive thought patterns.
We review them a few times in our sessions, but they are rarely something we would consider normal. Because of that, it can be easy to forget the little details that make these methods truly effective. If you write them down during the session, you have a cheat sheet to flip back to when you’re trying to use them in day to day life.
It can also be a solid practice to read through them on a regular basis, when you’re not in a moment of need, to help commit them to memory.
Always take therapy home with you.
Going to a therapy session is not like taking some form of antibiotics. It’s not:
Take one session, by mouth, once weekly for six weeks.
No. It’s more like having a broken down car. We can go to the store and buy the tools and parts we need to fix it, but we can’t do much work on it in the store.
When we go to therapy we’re given tools and pieces of a puzzle to work with between sessions to try to do the real work of therapy. We are instructed to take those tools and fix ourselves, rather than relying on someone else to fix us for us.
It seems a little off. I certainly didn’t think of therapy like this. I didn’t write down the tools that I was given in each session. I would try them once in the first day or two. When they didn’t work, I would struggle my way through life to the next appointment hoping for the fix to come there.
That’s not really the way it works. Can it? Yes. That is possible, but the best way to get better is to do what we can to work on things between the sessions. That is the best time to try your best to use those tools that you wrote down in that journal.
Make modifications to the tools you are given.
A therapist works out of their own pre-made tool kit. Those tools are selected based on your diagnosis and presenting symptoms or issues. They are completely generic though. If one doesn’t work, change it.
Every single coping mechanism I use is a modification or embellishment of one of the generic methods I was handed in the past. When I tried the generic equivalent, I found that they did work but just not well enough. So I changed parts of them until they were perfect for me.
This is what really tipped me over the scales on effectiveness of therapy. Maybe I’m in the minority when I say I didn’t really consider that this was how it was supposed to work. I may be the only one that ever thought that therapy was an out of the box, in office solution.
If you’re interested I discuss some in general here and my method for suicidal thoughts here.
Ask someone to hold you accountable.
If possible, recruit a trusted friend or loved one to check in on your therapy attendance and usage of your tools outside of therapy. It can help keep you accountable for your own care. It also makes the process more palatable if someone shows interest in your health as well. My wife fills the role for me.
Take your therapists recommendations seriously.
At times, I had reservations about the things my therapists told me to try. They seemed outlandish or else like they would not fit my life and situations. I would dither on them and even lie about my attempts with them.
For so many of those things, I’ll never know if they would have helped me. For others, I got the chance to make another go at them and have had more thrown my way since. I found that most of them actually did help. The ones that didn’t?
Well, I’ve tried many things in therapy that didn’t work.
Therapy isn’t a cut and dry, this will work, type of healing. It is trial and error after error until you finally find something that works. Try not to be disheartened by failed methods. Dust yourself off and try another. There are many paths to healing, and very few walk the same one as any other.
A few things coming up:
Promotion and Caution for Online Support Groups
I am Not a Collection of Labels
I Hate Switching Therapists
Originally published at https://justinjagels.com on June 21, 2019.
