SENTIENT TIMES Dec/Jan 2002

How to Make the Most Out of Therapy

By Julie Weber, MSW

Perhaps you have never had therapy before. Or maybe you have had therapy for years and are still trying to figure out how it works, how to use it. The following suggestions for using therapy to its best potential, while maximizing self-growth and minimizing the length of time required, are the result of my own experiences as both client and practitioner.

First and foremost, find a therapist that fits with your style of learning. Look for what social workers call “goodness of fit.” Try to find someone with whom you feel comfortable. Find someone who you respect. Trust your intuition. Check out several therapists in the beginning, if you are uncertain. Essentially, you are trusting this person to help you tend your soul (from psyche: the root word for psychology, psychotherapy).
Many therapists are trained in a broad range of styles and techniques. Nonetheless, a brief coverage of a few popular therapy modes may be helpful:

• Cognitive Behavioral Work
  Especially helpful for people who are linear, logic oriented. Cognitive behavioral therapies address thinking patterns and thinking errors that cause people repeated isolation and pain.
• Person in Environment
  A term used primarily by social workers (MSWs or LCSWs) to help elucidate larger social and structural issues that create and reinforce people’s problems. Problems thus become contextualized. For instance, eating disorders would be considered in the context of “thin is in.” AIDS would be considered against the backdrop of homophobia and heterosexism in our culture. Addressing and resolving these issues might involve actively challenging and working to change cultural assumptions about body image or sexual orientation.
• Feminist Therapy
  Feminists therapists assume an inherently relational view of human connections. Our connectedness with others determines how we think of ourselves. Patriarchal notions tend to undermine many aspects of human connection. Feminism reclaims healthy modes of connectivity. The personal is political. In changing ourselves, one by one, we collectively change the world.
• Jungian
  A Jungian therapist will reach beneath the surface of problem behaviors to try to grasp larger moves (or attempts to move) toward wholeness. For instance, promiscuity might be understood as the soul’s effort to reclaim the erotic as a living mystery; illness might be glimpsed in terms of a grappling with death, or as a paradigm shift from doing to being; bulimia might be an attempt to move beyond imagery of the maiden into the fullness of the dark goddess. Often problem behaviors short circuit the very thing that the soul keeps moving towards. Jungian therapists use myths and dreams to glimpse images and aspects of the soul’s journey.
• EMDR
  Eye Movement Desensitization Therapy is a sometimes effective way to move rapidly through ingrained trauma. When beliefs, patterns, etc. become entrenched, EMDR accesses and helps reprogram stuck patterns by oscillating right and left brain awareness. Might sound kooky, but it can be surprisingly effective, particularly with trauma issues.

Become an active participant in your change process. Identify your goals. One person’s goal might be to move through memories of sexual abuse, to identify the effects of sexual abuse on current relationships and to integrate new coping skills. Actively bring things to your therapy appointment: Leftovers, or things from your last session that you are/have been still thinking about; research, from the library or internet; dreams; submerged feelings of sadness, anger, etc.; pieces of your self that seem hardest to accept.

Once you have established safety, it’s also helpful to bring insights about control issues, ways you undermine yourself or others, obsessive thinking about weight or body image, needs for perfections, drives toward competition, hierarchical thinking, feelings of futility, laziness, depression, critical self-thinking. None of these things are explicitly bad. Awareness of any or all of them helps shed light on individual/cultural blindspots and may help therapists image emerging aspects of soul.

If your therapist doesn’t suggest homework, exercises or reading material, ask for it. Move beyond the session itself. Extend your growth process through the rest of your week.

Recognize and enlist your therapist as a partner and guide, but not an authority on your life. There is no need to abdicate complete control to your counselor. Certainly, listen respectfully and consider your therapist’s promptings, but cultivate and retain the ability to actively discern what is useful to you. Even the best of therapists will make mistakes and (knowingly or unknowingly) occasionally project things onto you. Use this relationship, with a therapist trained in conscious use of self, to practice simultaneous openness and discernment. This is the grit of good relationships.

Open to deeper levels of empathy within yourself. This is the primary goal of most therapies. Good therapists will help you move empathy into places of discomfort and unfamiliarity. The result is less shame, more self acceptance, more tolerance and more compassion, both within yourself and in relationship to others.

A final caveat: Watch your shadow. Begin to bring awareness to places we blame others, to people against whom we hold resentments. These resentments, blames, etc. are often charged, dynamic relationships with unrealized parts of ourselves. We each stand on our own blindspots. Self-observation of ways we project judgment elucidates rejected parts of ourselves. Look for patterns. Find your shadow. “Eat it,” as Robert Bly says. Begin to digest pieces of things you project. The goal of shadow work is wholeness through integration of disowned aspects of the self. All good therapies sooner or later take you there.

Julie Weber, MSW, is a psychotherapist in private practice who works sliding scale with couples, adults and teen girls. She does both short and long term psychotherapy, using a range of tools and techniques, with an emphasis on finding meaning and growth through hardship. She can be reached at (541) 482-7416.

SENTIENT TIMES
PO Box 1330 Ashland, OR 97520
PHONE (541) 512-1084 • FAX (541) 512-1085
dmokma@jeffnet.org