Let’s be honest, therapy is hard work that requires a serious time, effort, and financial commitment. If you have the advantage of being able to seek therapy for yourself, then I’d like to share some tips on how to get the most out of the experience in a meaningful way.
Get Real
Being genuine in your therapy sessions is fundamental. Express all the deep, dark thoughts and feelings you secretly think you should not have. The job of your therapist is not to judge you; it’s to listen to your spoken words and uncover the content of your subconscious that you are not aware of. To truly experience personal growth, your therapist needs to be able to access the full spectrum of your experience.
Cultivate Self-Awareness
Allocate time to journal after each therapy session to make note of what insights were shared and what resonated with you. Not a fan of journaling? Take time to sit with your thoughts and feelings left over from the session. Perhaps make yourself a cup of tea to sit in the backyard, sit outside in the park, or park your car by a quiet spot to just let those feelings percolate.
In between sessions, take time to reflect on your daily experiences that are related to the focus of therapy. This can include things like situations that activate your emotions and trigger urges to act in particular ways that may be keeping you stuck in an unhelpful dynamic with your relationship to yourself, with others, with food, with work, with exercise, with alcohol, and the list goes on.
Take notice of your thoughts. What words or ideas accompany big feelings? What judgments are you making mentally about what is happening for you? Notice how those thoughts affect your feelings and what urges they create within you.
Notice how the way you behave affects others around you. Bring these observations with you to your sessions.
Be Clear about YOUR Goal
There are two important points when thinking about therapy goals. The first is whether your goals are realistic. Often, people come to therapy with goals of wanting to turn off their emotions – “I want to be less stressed,” “I want to be happy,” “I want to not be affected by stress or my trauma.” Therapy isn't about suppressing emotions; rather, it's about utilizing them as a compass to navigate and become acquainted with your inner landscape. Therapy is not miraculous either - we cannot accomplish feats that lie outside the ordinary realms of human experience.
While this is partly a collaboration with your therapist, it is important that you can identify what you personally hope to achieve through therapy. You may have fairly broad and vague goals such as wanting to feel better, be less anxious, or be less stressed, but try to imagine specific things that would actually change in your life if you did feel better, less anxiety, and less stress. Perhaps it’s that you would engage in more social activities, try new things more, travel more, engage with your hobbies more, or have fewer arguments with your partner. Be specific about what you are looking to change, as this will help your therapist be more targeted with your treatment and, in turn, potentially take fewer unhelpful detours and achieve your goals sooner.
Be Realistic about Therapy
Therapy is not for everyone, nor is it for everything. There are many problems we face as humans that are systemic and that therapy cannot solve. While therapy can fully resolve some conditions, the most realistic outcome is better management of the condition that brought you to therapy in the first place.
Therapy is a process. It takes time for the information shared with you to percolate and sink in, and it takes time for your therapist to learn enough about you to be able to share their feedback about what is going on for you. And then it takes more time to test out predictions about what is keeping things going for you, introduce ideas to help make change, for you to implement changes, review, problem-solve, personalize, and rinse and repeat.
Be kind and patient with yourself (and your therapist) throughout the therapeutic process.
Be Open to Feedback
It is a gift to have someone care enough about you to honestly share with you the ways in which you might be making your life harder than it needs to be. Be open to receiving feedback about your ways of thinking and acting that may be contributing to your suffering. Let go of defensiveness and the tendency to assign fault and blame to others in your life, including your therapist. Though it is our job, it takes a lot of courage for a therapist to raise potentially upsetting things in sessions that may offend you. Meet us halfway and listen with an open mind. If we are wrong, do let us know.
The process of feedback is a two-way street. If something isn't effective for you, communicate with your therapist. Similarly, if something is beneficial, it's valuable information for your therapist. Therapy is a collaborative partnership, and the best results come from working together on the process.
Apply Insights to Daily Life
The work you do in therapy isn’t confined to the therapy room. Therapy is also (usually) only an hour a week. This equates to 0.60% of your life that week!
Apply the insights and strategies you gain to your everyday life immediately. Discuss insights with loved ones. I tend to notice that clients who discuss key points from sessions with their loved ones will generally experience an expansion of ideas specific to their own lives and come back with brilliant insights to share. Our loved ones experience us too, and sharing can open the door to meaningful discussions about your impact on them, which has a profound effect on your own healing journey.
If the type of therapy you are engaged in is more strategies-based, then the only way that the strategies will actually work when it matters is if you practice them. You cannot expect to learn to swim in the pool one day and expect to swim in the ocean the next day. Many strategies might appear simple and straightforward, yet this is precisely where many individuals fail to derive the full benefit of therapy, as they frequently overlook the importance of skill mastery.
If you are engaged in exposure therapy, your treatment outcome will be 100% affected if you do not follow through with exposure tasks between sessions. A necessary part of creating change is building momentum.
Be Committed and Regular
Consistency is the next logical point following on from building momentum. Commit to scheduling and attending sessions regularly, anywhere between weekly to fortnightly to start. If there will be large gaps between sessions, discuss with your psychologist what you can do to maintain focus on your therapy goals. Perhaps this could be in the form of podcasts, books, or other material your psychologist might be able to send you to supplement/complement therapy.
This may seem obvious, but engage fully in the process when you do attend. It’s not realistic to expect every session of therapy to be filled with light bulb moments. Some sessions might feel like you are going around in circles, and progress may feel slow. Some moments may seem inconsequential but may be a small seed that is planted, waiting to sprout in a future moment. Some themes and stories need to be repeated and retold before something clicks or shifts in you.
Be Open to Feeling Your Feelings
Allow yourself to fully experience and explore your emotions during therapy. This process can be challenging and scary but is essential in doing the work of therapy.
Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Often, the way to feel better has little to do with thinking at all. Some of the most helpful therapeutic frameworks emphasize the experiencing and processing of emotions as being the change factors.
This is why psychological safety in therapy is the ultimate priority. Seek a therapist who can create this sense of safety for you and be sure to keep the therapeutic space safe for both of you through mutual respect.
Reflect on Progress and Share Wins
Regularly take stock of your progress. Reflect on what has changed since you began therapy, both big and small. Celebrating these milestones can reinforce your motivation and highlight the value of your therapeutic journey. Don’t forget to share these wins with your therapist!
If you come up short with knowing what progress has been made, why not try asking your therapist in your next session.
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Starting therapy takes tremendous courage and vulnerability. Therefore, it is in your best interest to be able to get the most out of sessions. Your effort matters, and you should be able to see it bear fruit.
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