If you are currently in traditional methods of therapy her are some things to take note of to help you save time and money. This post will discuss ways to optimize appointments to get the most progress out of therapy sessions that you can easily apply to your path.
1)You will need to be 110% honest.
2)Notice the survival habits and how to mitigate them.
3)Know your topics and what would make you comfortable discussing them.
4)Reflect on discomfort during a session.
5)Consider the small things about a session.
6)Losing the stigma around therapy to be more comfortable on appointment day.
1. You will need to be 110% honest.
You will get the most progress when you decide to be 110% honest.
This realization came at a point in my life when a boyfriend drowned, and I lost all of my faith. I waited a few months but then realized I needed help and began reflecting on why I quit therapy. I’d been to therapy on and off again for years. I thought about all the time it took and tried to think of ways to make it more worthwhile. The short answer is that if I were going to do therapy again, I’d just have to be 110% honest. To get a different result, you must try something new.
Not talking about your situation can become commonplace in traumatic or complicated situations. Shame is the emotion behind not wanting to talk about your traumatic event. Lying can become a survival habit and a valid one to keep you from feeling these emotions. Traumas can be complex situations that are controversial in everyday life. These survival habits could keep you safe in day-to-day life. To be safely 110% honest, we need to recognize some of our survival habits when they are necessary and the times when they might be holding us back.
2. Notice that survival habits can show up in therapy – mitigate them.
It is necessary to start recognizing when these completely valid and necessary survival habits are not required in a session. This means that once we have done the work to find a therapist and schedule sessions and are in the first session, there cannot be any holding back. To feel comfortable letting go of the lying survival habit and risk feeling shame or embarrassment, my therapist needed to be a specific gender.
You have done the work and set up a safe session environment; in this environment, protecting yourself from shame or embarrassment is unnecessary. During the scheduling process, ask questions and communicated vague topics for what my sessions would cover. This prepares them for the issues that will come up, and they will be able to have specific resources available. They usually reply by confirming these are areas they will understand, they might have even had to navigate something similar for themselves (because you asked for someone with experience in this area during scheduling) and that it is something they can relate to.
After all, your therapist is a human with a human experience. This should help to build some trust right away from the beginning of the first appointment.
This is one of the beautiful aspects of the internet and its power in trauma support. Use this information to start identifying how to break survival habits and shave some years off your recovery path. Be 110% honest with yourself and explore the question below.
Create Awareness for Survival Habits
Q1) What survival habits do I have from my situation? If nothing is immediately apparent to you and the answer is “I don’t know,” that is okay. Rephrase the question: If any survival habits emerged from my experience, what might they be?
3. Know your topics and what it would take to feel comfortable discussing them.
Finding a therapist with whom you are comfortable can take multiple appointments, time, and money, which you don’t have. Thinking through the topics and situations you’d like to discuss will help you identify and find the best fit.
If you need to resolve sexual abuse, consider if you have any gender preference. It might feel sexist, even saying that you have a preference for one gender. Prioritize your healing over the guilt of feeling sexist. It could very well mean that you will only be comfortable disclosing information and discussing certain events with 110% honesty with a certain gender. Not prioritizing healing this way led to stalling during the session to decide how you want to respond and could end with you holding back on the level of detail ending with 98% honesty.
This is not good enough. The stalling and withholding wastes precious session time repeatedly, and you are paying for this time. Withholding can also minimize the impact that the trauma is having on you and hide the severity of other coping mechanisms that you have adopted. Each therapist will have their own style, but gender is something that you shouldn’t negotiate on. You can address systemic issues of sexism after you feel safe and are healed. With mental health, your cup comes first, then others.
Q2) How might your survival habit impact a therapy session? And what would make you comfortable letting go of this habit during a session?
4. Reflect on discomfort during a therapy session.
You might have two different therapists before finding one you are comfortable working with. It can be frustrating making two different appointments and only to realize that this therapist was not a good fit. You might feel like a failure; if you reach this point, hear my words, “You did not fail, knowing what doesn’t work in progress.”
You are not only ok, but you are also farther along than you were yesterday, and you have just hit a huge milestone; recognize your growth. Understand that knowing your needs is growth and that shifting gears that cause a weeklong “delay” is an investment toward recovery quicker once you have got a good fit. Spending two months with a therapist you are not comfortable talking to about your situations with 110% honesty is wasting you far more than going to your #2 therapist option and making an appointment that is a week out.
Time is a resource you cannot get back; one way of saving time in your therapy process is to accept that the first therapist might not be the perfect fit and move on to the next option.
5. Consider the small things about a session.
With topics of trauma, the feelings of shame get after our self-worth and worth to others. To maintain a safe session space, the confidentiality of the session is essential, and like all medical doctors, formal therapists take an oath. State and federal laws regulate licensed therapists.
A survival habit might be creeping in from something as small as not feeling like the room is soundproof enough and creating a feeling that your confidentiality is at risk. If it is a larger therapy office, this might be particularly true because of the busy hallways. Communicate these things to your therapist. They might already be buying a white noise maker or might be able to run down the hall and grab one from a therapist who does not have an appointment at that hour. I had a cubical job and purchased one for myself. They are inexpensive, and you could just take one with you and see if they don’t mind plugging it in.
Have you ever heard the adage “turning a mouse into an elephant?” Sometimes, it’s the small things that we make into big issues. In these examples, purchasing a sound maker, a small thing like a mouse, was an easy solution to the soundproof issue instead of making the situation bigger and asking to change rooms or cube locations. The point is to let your therapist know about your discomforts because there might be an easy solution.
6. Losing the stigma around therapy to be more comfortable on appointment day.
The therapy services were in a white house during my college years. Not a school building but a house so that it would feel homey. I love the idea, but it felt weird and out of place. I felt so exposed just calling and making an appointment and giving them my name. Now, I have to walk across campus and up to this building; everyone knows it is for therapy services. There was no way for me to be discrete. I can only say no one saw; if they did, they said nothing.
This huge stressor caused me a lot of worry but didn’t create any drama or fallout. From what I can tell, the stigma of therapy has fallen off over the years, and even in my generation, therapy is now accepted and encouraged.
If you’re in a place where therapy still has a stigma, science is probably going to be one of your biggest allies. Education in neuroscience has come a long way and provides a lot of tangibility to the mental health area. From the point of healing, for example, neuroplasticity continues throughout life, and your brain is not broken. It can evolve and change with training, and getting a professional to help you throughout is completely acceptable for mental health as it is for physical health. And, when you think of it this way, it is a little silly to think otherwise.
The rest of the starting therapy articles are posted check them out at the links below.
How to Find a Therapist, a Good Therapist
