Making the Most of Your Therapy

Therapy is an opportunity to look at things in your life, and to explore potentially more satisfying ways of living. Research shows that therapy can be very helpful for many people, and that most clients leave counselling feeling much better than when they started. Research also shows that the more clients know about therapy before they start, and the more they put into it, the more they are likely to get out of it. For this reason, I have provided the following information to tell you basically about what I offer, and how you can make therapy as helpful as possible for you.

Therapy 'menu':

Here is a therapy 'menu' of sorts, so you can decide, with my support, what you most want to work on. Some of the issues that clients often choose to focus on are:

• Talking through an issue in order to make sense of what has happened, and to put things in perspective;
• Making sense of a specific problematic experience or event that sticks in your mind;
• Problem-solving, planning and decision-making;
• Exploring past experiences and relationships that may have an influence on current behaviours and attitude;
• Understanding and working to change behaviours and attitude;
• Negotiating a life transition or developmental crisis;
• Exploring difficult feelings or emotions;
• Finding, analysing and acting on information;
• Undoing self-criticism and enhancing self-care, self-acceptance, and self-belief;
• Addressing difficult or painful relationships (with one's self and others).

Often, clients find it most helpful to work on issues on a step-by-step basis. One of the ways therapy can help is working with you to disentangle the various strands of the issues, and help you to decide what needs to be addressed first.

A Flexible, Personalised Approach to Helping You:

The therapy I offer is based on the belief that people are experts on their own lives (even if they don't feel like they are), who have lots of potentially good ideas about how to deal with their difficulties. One of my main roles, as I see it, is to help the person make the best use of their own resources, strengths, experiences, and viewpoints.

The following sections look at some different ways you can prepare yourself to get the most benefit from therapy:

1. Thinking about what you want from therapy

At the start of therapy, some people find it hard to be clear about exactly what it is that they want to achieve. They have maybe some vague sense of what they hope to get from therapy. This is perfectly normal – we can talk about your goals, and gradually they will become clearer. It is fine to have lots of goals, or just one. It is also fine if your goals change. What is important is to help me understand as best as possible what it is that you'd like from therapy.

It may also help to use a Goals Form so you get the most from your therapy. The Goals Form is a simple, personalised tool that can be used to set goals in Counselling and Psychotherapy, and to monitor your progress towards them. The term 'goal' can seem like a pressure to perform and achieve a certain task but this is not so in this case. It is just a word used that can be replaced with 'aims' or 'direction' of therapy just as well. 

4. Being active between therapy sessions

Between therapy sessions with you; I'll reflect on, and review what happened in the last sessions, both privately and in supervision, in order to prepare for our next session. It would be valuable if you do the same.

At times, if it feels right for you, it might be helpful to perhaps work on ideas like; ‘bridging activities’, 'homework', 'experiments', or otherwise that you could complete between sessions. Even if this doesn't happen, it is still useful for you to think about what has come up in the therapy, whether you are getting what you need, or how your therapy could be adjusted, and so on. It might be a challenge to remember these thoughts, and one idea is to consider keeping a therapy diary, where you can write freely about what the therapy has meant to you.

5. If you feel concern about anything – please feel free to ask

Finally, there may be questions that have not been covered here that could make a difference to your ability to make effective use of the therapy. If you have any further questions or queries please do ask.

Interesting and simple elements the research in Counselling & Psychotherapy points to as being of most help to clients. What we know so far (with some certainty):

• Counselling & Psychotherapy helps: in general, people who have therapy end up less distressed than those who do not.
• For many forms of psychological distress, therapy is as effective as medication, and possibly more so in the long term.
• Psychological therapies are cost-effective forms of treatment.
• In general, there are only small differences in the effectiveness of different bona fide therapies.
• Clients' levels of involvement in therapy and their capacity to make use of the therapeutic relationship are among the strongest predictors of outcomes.
• Therapists' way of relating to their clients are more important to the outcomes of therapy than their personal, demographic or professional characteristics.
• Positive outcomes are associated with a collaborative, caring, empathic, and skilled way of relating.
• Therapeutic techniques can be a useful part of the counselling and psychotherapy process.

Essential Research Findings in Counselling and Psychotherapy: The Facts are Friendly - M. Cooper, 2008.

How can counselling help? Interview data with clients suggests 5 distinctive (albeit interrelated) processes of change:

1. Insight leads to behaviour change: Learning about yourself, others, and why you can end up doing unhelpful things can help you make more helpful choices about what to do.
2. Getting things off your chest: Talking about things with someone who cares and listens can lead to a sense of unburdening, and not carrying so much stuff alone.
3. Learning coping methods: Advice and guidance from the counsellor can help you find better ways of doing things.
4. Developing relational abilities: Trusting and opening up to a therapist can help develop the ability to communicate better with others in your life.
5. Enhancing self-acceptance: Telling your real experiences to someone who values and accepts you can lead you to feel more positive about yourself.

Mick Cooper, 2020.

Albert Einstein is widely credited with saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”