People with a wide range of problems — from depression to marital strife to simple phobias like the fear of flying — can reap the benefits of psychotherapy.
The common reasons you might seek therapy are listed below.
Significant or Chronic Emotional Distress
Most people seek therapy — or any professional treatment, for that matter — to relieve pain or distress. Experiencing emotional pain is part of being human. But sometimes this distress is severe or long-standing and it could impair your daily life. Therapy might be appropriate for you if you feel emotional distress — sadness, anxiety, grief — that is persistent and troubling.
Relationship Problems
Often, emotional distress comes from difficulty in relationships. Troubled relationships may involve a spouse, parent, child, coworker or significant other. Therapy can help you understand the root of the problem and provide you with the tools you need to correct it.
Skills Acquisition
Some emotional distress or relationship problems are associated with the lack of a particular skill. Such problems can include excessive shyness, poor communication, lack of assertiveness or poor anger control. Many types of psychotherapy enable people to acquire or improve these skills. In these cases, the treatment focuses on teaching people to be able to do what they need to do to feel better.
Sexual Problems
Sexual dissatisfaction and dysfunction are common problems that can be embarrassing to talk about. Over the last several decades, therapists have made substantial progress in helping people obtain the most enjoyment out of their sexual functioning.
Recent Loss
Powerful attachments to others are uniquely human experiences. Enduring breaks in these attachments — through death or separation — can result in great emotional pain. Psychotherapy can help you cope with the loss.
Victim of Trauma or Abuse
Being the victim of physical or sexual abuse, or another form of violence, such as being in an automobile accident, can overwhelm your capacity to cope and leave scars that impair your ability to live a normal life. Psychotherapy can provide a confidential arena to discuss these issues with a caring, supportive person. By focusing on healing the wound caused by the trauma, psychotherapy can help you move forward with your life.
A Clinical Disorder or Condition
Persons with certain disorders or conditions can benefit from regimens that include psychotherapy and other forms of treatment, such as medication. For example, research shows that individuals with conditions such as major depression or bipolar disorder benefit from a combination of psychotherapy and medication. One type of treatment without the other might produce inadequate results.
Personal Growth
Though you might not have clinical conditions or symptoms, psychotherapy can help you learn more about yourself and others and teach you how to control your life more effectively. It can help you overcome obstacles that have kept you from reaching your goals and becoming the person you want to be.
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INFORMATION CORNER:
“I can’t understand my self. Please hear what I’m not saying!”
When we are being our True Self, we become free to grow (not eternally wounded!). Yet for most of us, it’s a struggle. Some have estimated that we show our True Self to others on the average of only 15 minutes each day!
Let me share with you the following poem written by Charles Finn. It describes many of our struggles with the “false self.”
“Don’t be fooled by me.
Don’t be fooled by the face I wear.
For I wear a mask, a thousand masks,
masks that I’m afraid to take off,
and none of them is me.
Pretending is an art that’s second nature with me,
but don’t be fooled.
For God’s sake, don’t be fooled.
I give you the impression that I’m secure,
that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without,
that confidence is my name and coolness my game,
that the water’s calm and I’m in command,
and that I need no one.
But don’t believe me.
My surface may seem smooth but my surface is my mask,
ever-varying and ever-concealing.
Beneath lies no complacence.
Beneath lies confusion and fear and aloneness.
But I hide this. I don’t want anybody to know it.
I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear of being exposed. That’s why I frantically create a mask to hide behind,
a nonchalant sophisticated facade,
to help me pretend,
to shield me from the glance that knows.
But such a glance is precisely my salvation.
My only hope and I know it.
That is, if it’s followed by acceptance,
if it’s followed by love.
It’s the only thing that can liberate me from myself,
from my own self-built prison walls,
from the barriers I so painstakingly erect.
It’s the only thing that will assure me of what I can’t
assure myself,
that I’m really worth something.
But I don’t tell you thing. I don’t dare. I’m afraid to.
I’m afraid your glance will not be followed by acceptance,
will not be followed by love.
I’m afraid you’ll think less of me, that you’ll laugh,
and your laugh would kill me.
I’m afraid that deep-down I’m nothing, that I’m just
no good,
and that you will see this and reject me.
So I play my game, my desperate pretending game,
with a facade of assurance without
and a trembling child within.
So begins the glittering but empty parade of masks,
and my life becomes a front.
I idly chatter to you in the suave tones of surface talk.
I tell you everything that’s really nothing,
and nothing of what’s everything,
of what’s crying within me.
So when I’m going through my routine,
do not be fooled by what I’m saying.
Please listen carefully and try to hear what I’m not saying,
what I’d like to be able to say,
what for survival I need to say,
but what I can’t say.
I don’t like to hide.
I don’t like to play superficial phony games.
I want to stop playing them.
I want to be genuine and spontaneous and me,
but you’ve got to help me.
You’ve got to hold out your hand
even when that’s the last thing I seem to want.
Only you can wipe away from my eyes the blank stare of the
breathing dead.
Only you can call me into aliveness.
Each time you’re kind and gentle and encouraging,’
my heart begins to grow wings,
very small wings,
very feeble wings,
but wings!
With your power to touch me into feeling
you can breathe life into me.
I want you to know that.
I want you to know how important you are to me,
how you can be a creator-honest-to-God creator–
of the person that is me
if you choose to.
You alone can break down the wall behind which I tremble,
you alone can remove my mask,
you alone can release me from my shadow-world of panic
and uncertainty, from my lonely prison,
if you choose to.
Please choose to. Do not pass me by.
It will not be easy for you.
A long conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls.
The nearer you approach to me,
the blinder I may strike back.
It’s irrational, but despite what the books say about man,
often I am irrational.
I fight against the very thing that I cry out for.
But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls,
and in this lies my hope.
Please try to beat down those walls
with firm hands
but with gentle hands
for a child is very sensitive.
Who am I, you may wonder?
I am someone you know very well.
For I am every man you meet
and I am every woman you meet.”
