Does Therapy Help?


Psychodynamic therapy allows you to look at your childhood relationships in a safe environment.
Person-centred counselling works with whatever the client brings to therapy. The client is held in 'unconditional positive regard'.
Transactional Analysis looks at the drama that develops in the triangulation of parent-parent-child and how the three roles of aggressor-victim-saviour are played out.
Integrative therapy is the most common form, where the therapist adopts different types of analysis to help the client.
I have had lots of help and counselling in my time and went through processes that I didn’t fully understand at the time and certainly couldn’t label. I was grateful just to be able to talk, gain advice and be listened to. Every session helped me pick myself up and carry on for a few more weeks. I was searching for a cure that probably does not exist. I read many self-help books and took something from each to try to change my thinking. I had other coping strategies but I always felt that how and what I thought, was the key to my illness and would change me for the better. In the early days, I was swept along by my feelings and had little understanding of what was going on in my head. I could only see the obvious, not the hidden processes that burst out of me as anxiety and then depression. I needed to understand what was going on inside my head. As I mentioned above, some therapies help you look back over your life and resolve the damaged moments. Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) does not do this. It is designed to let you see how your current thinking is destructive and to change the way you think. Simply put, you have to turn the negative thoughts into positive thoughts. This may sound easy but it isn’t. I needed someone to guide me through this process and have faith in my ability to grasp some painful truths. I have spoken to a number of people who have said that CBT did not work for them and I respect their view. I feel I am still a work in progress but have faith in my psychiatrist to help me achieve a new equilibrium. Progress is slow and I seem to go backwards and forwards. Setbacks are to be expected and it is then that you need the voice of reason, from friends and professionals alike. In my next blog, I will talk about what I have gone through in the last two years and what progress I have made with CBT.

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