What does psychotherapy offer/do?
Sometimes, the suffering we are feeling gets to be more than we can handle. We’ve tried and tried but just can’t make it better. Most people come to therapy wanting to remain who they are but they just want to feel better. I don’t want to say too much here and scare you off, but if you choose to work with me, you will learn new ways to understand who you are, new ways to understand your emotions, new ways to understand why you have the thoughts you do, and why you do the things you do. When you embrace the perspectives I will teach you you will have the power to change your inner and outer worlds.
Clearly, we do not choose to have many of the thoughts we have, and neither do we choose to feel the way we often feel; they seem to mostly happen to us. (Though happy, successful people would claim they think their thoughts, and have made their choices, which has resulted in their happiness and well-being.) What I can offer you, that you can’t (it is highly unlikely you can’t) do for yourself, is to teach you about and guide you into the places inside your psyche (some might say, your mind) that give you your thoughts and emotions and make you do the things you do that you wish you didn’t.
You might buy a popular self-help book and try to do it yourself, but having an expert, who you have come to trust and like, guide you in these processes is much more effective. While you are working on deep fear or anger or humiliation or overwhelm… you want to be able to relax and be open and aware of what’s going on and let me guide and hold you through these tender places.
Therapists can be divided into two basic groups: those who focus on the past, and those who focus on the present and future. I am in the group who believe most all of your pain and suffering comes from how you are holding and living your past. If you try to sit with issues and try to just be positive it will be like taking Tylenol when you have cancer. I believe you can’t get better until you get the cancer out. Further, much of your memory is stored in the body at a level that you’re not even aware of it; it’s sub-conscious (below the level of) consciousness. These memories, or these aspects of memory, cannot be reached by regular talk therapy (which addresses what one is aware of and can talk about).
The two main approaches that I use, IFS and EMDR (often together), are extraordinarily effective at transforming how you relate to those past events that are making your present so disturbing. They both are designed to get into your sub-conscious memory, and into your body, to remove (desensitize, dissolve, unburden, transform…) the shame, fear, overwhelm of what you’re still holding from your past.
If the above sounds scary or intimidating, I will say it does take some courage, but after you’ve done some of the deep work and experience how liberated you feel (many clients say they feel their real self again!) you will look forward to doing more.