WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THERAPY

Below are several points that I have found helpful with clients making a good start in psychotherapy with me.  Most of them revolve around having enough connection and safety between you and me that you feel reasonably understood and seen by me and also feel that I sufficiently have your best interests at heart so that I can challenge you as needed.

1. ENOUGH CONNECTION AND SAFETY: If you have gotten this far in reading, it may mean that you like what you have read so far and that you might already feel a connection or even a kindred spirit with me.  If that describes you and if you were to contact me for therapy, please let me know what you connected with in my self-disclosure in the “Introduction to My Approach” section. That would be an important beginning building-block for our work together.  However, if you are struggling to connect with what I have written, a different good starting point for therapy could be addressing what you fear I might not hear about you that you would need me to hear and understand.  Also, regarding safety, it might be too soon to really feel safe with anyone, let alone a stranger you have not yet met.  If this is the case, then addressing early in therapy any concerns you have about safety or confidentiality would also be important.
2. ENOUGH BEING HEARD AND BEING VALIDATED: The theologian Paul Tillich (see Dimension 3) said, “The first duty of love is to listen.”  My first job in building with you a strong therapeutic relationship is to hear and listen to your experiences around the difficulties that bring you into therapy.  For example, if it is clear that there are some cultural or other differences between us, you will likely be aware before I will that I might have a hard time understanding the context in which you are angry or depressed or even self-loathing.  On the other side, I have had numerous clients of mine tell me that being heard in a non-judgmental way in therapy with me has been very healing.  Of course, I do not assume that any of my clients are perfect, my goal would be to validate each of my client’s personhood—not every behavior of the client.
3. OVER TIME, ENOUGH TRUST TO TOLERATE THE CHALLENGES OF THERAPY: If there is enough connection and enough validation of one’s personhood, then trust should begin to develop to face within the safety of therapy one’s most troubling dilemmas.  After his client had just revealed how she thought about a complex problem, Menninger Clinic psychologist Jon Allen (see Dimension 1) commented, “The mind is a scary place.”  His client responded, “And you wouldn’t want to go there alone.”  Once a reasonably safe container is built collaboratively by client and therapist, then the foundation is laid for addressing honestly any disparity between the path one is on in life and the path one would like to be on.  Of course, a commitment to working on a major change in one’s life path involves work outside of the therapy session.  Such application of therapeutic principles in one’s life is probably the single most important indient in making lasting, meaningful change.
4. ENOUGH SKILL AND KNOWLEDGE OF MY PART, AS THERAPIST: While the three points stated above address client and therapist together establishing the necessary context for meaningful change, it is also important that I, as therapist, have specific knowledge in helpful theories and helpful techniques.  The rest of this manual will explain the theoretical approaches I most use and will give specific examples about how clients have made use of the resulting applications or techniques in ways that helped change their lives for the “better path” that they yearned for.