About Therapy
The Therapeutic Process...
We are now teammates with the shared goal of wanting you to feel better!
Part of therapy will be about working together to establish your goals, values, learning style, availability for therapy, and things you hope to change vs. things we can work to accept. Overtime, you will learn about different research-supported interventions - fully customized to your needs. Therapy can have amazing effects on peoples' lives!
And... there are some things to consider when embarking on this journey:
1) Therapy will always be a safe space but may not always be a comfortable space. As with trying a new challenging work-out, taking a spoonful of bitter medicine, or incorporating kale into your diet: therapy won't always feel good in the moment. But we hope that the pay off will be worth the hard work!
When you first start talking about distressing experiences or feelings, please be aware that it is normal for symptoms to flare up. Communicate with me about this. We can always adjust our pace, workload, and/or we can practice experiencing difficult feelings in ways that may reduce our suffering.
2) Just because something is "proven" by research to be effective, doesn't mean it will work for you! You are the expert on you, and therapy is a collaborative process. I will always want your feedback about what is working and what is not. We are partners in troubleshooting how to get your feeling better.
The ultimate goal will be for us to build you a therapy "toolbox." These are things that you can take with you outside of the office and apply to real-life situations. This might include things such as coping skills, psycho-education, a support network, comforting activities, crisis management tools, communication techniques, etc.
3) Finding what works for YOU is going to take patience and an an open mind. To get the best results, we want to give things a fair chance to work. Sometimes that means practicing simple tasks, even when it feels silly at first... But knowing how to do something, being able to do something, and being able to default to doing something are different skills. They show up in the brain differently. Keep an open mind. Have patience. And practice practice practice.
Every time you practice something, you are changing the way your brain works - one step at a time. If a technique is still not working for you after giving it a shot, we will discuss and re-adjust our plan!
It takes a lot of courage to start therapy. You are doing a brave thing! I look forward to supporting you throughout the process and collaborating to give you the best experience possible.
-Rebecca