How to get the most benefit out of your therapy sessions - maximising your investment
You have assessed your personal situation and made a conscious decision to reach out and get some therapeutic help and support. Well done! You’ve taken a brave and important step to better your mental health. It takes courage and strength to ask for help and you should be proud of yourself for making this decision.
Being in therapy can be a great experience. This is a safe space cultivated to help you have the opportunity to increase your insight, sharpen your emotional intelligence, and resolve unhelpful patterns and habits. If you’ve started the therapy process, you’ll know that therapy is both a commitment and an investment of your resources; energy, time, money and efforts into changing, growing and developing yourself. Committing to your inner healing and investing in yourself can reap many benefits. However, making room for therapy in your busy schedule and figuring out how to do all the change work can also leave you with mixed feelings and questions; about what the therapy work entails and about what you need to do to make therapy work for you.
Getting the most out of therapy requires a combination of: doing and being, feeling and processing, expressing and listening, willingness and openness, reflection and spontaneity, self-exploration and guided exploration, and so much more.
Regardless of your own unique goals for therapy, here are some positive steps you can take to get the most out of your therapy sessions that can help you to consistently grow.
1. Cultivate a mindset that sets you up for better outcomes
Remind yourself that your therapy sessions are designed for you, to help you recover, heal and/or deal with your challenges. Entering this process with a closed mind or fixed mindset will make it difficult for you to make headway with your issues. Therefore, try your best to practice adopting an open and curious mindset that will enable you to build insight. This can look like exploring different ideas/perspectives, looking at possible underlying issues which may be perpetuating your struggles, etc.
2. Accept that therapy is NOT a quick fix
Clarify your expectations for therapy. Holding realistic expectations is vital, as therapy is not a quick fix, and it takes time and effort to build good traction towards understanding your problems and finding the right solutions for you. Mental health is complex and just as it takes time for problems to develop and begin interfering in your life, it takes time to work through and unravel those challenges. Keep persevering and remember that positive, long-lasting change often takes a considerable amount of time.
3. Schedule a ‘before-session’ and ‘after-session’ reflection time
Scheduling some quiet, reflective time before and after your session can minimise stress and anxiety and help you stay focused and mindful on your therapeutic goals.
Pre-session, prepare by engaging in grounding exercises to create the mental space to be present with yourself, your session, and your therapist. This helps you to disentangle from the experiences of your week and to connect back to your inner growth.
Post-session, create some reflective time after each session to sit with surfacing feelings and to process the therapy work you accomplished during the session. Consider any revelations you may have had and ponder on their significance. If your session revealed any of your unhelpful patterns of thought or behaviors, try to be aware of them in your daily life.
As some sessions may feel more challenging than others, plan to have an appropriate amount of time to process after your sessions. Rushing to your appointment and rushing elsewhere after your appointments may not be the most conducive way to really benefit from the time together. Remember that processing and reflecting on important ideas from your session is part of ‘doing the work’ to feeling better.
4. Cultivate an Internal Focus for Change
While a lot of problems can be contextually related (things/people around us), therapy is mainly focused on you, and how you relate to yourself and your context. While it can initially be helpful to vent a little, in the long run this can be counterproductive and may impede your progress. Use your therapy time to talk about you. Be ready to put in the work to look at your own internal processes - your triggers, thoughts, feelings, behaviours, coping mechanisms, reactions, schemas, values, etc. This will help you to accept the things you can and cannot change.
5. Be honest with yourself and your therapist
Self-honesty is a prerequisite to inner healing. Being self-honest can help you to uncover your underlying problems and help you see and acknowledge some historical patterns that may have been contributing to your suffering. This can facilitate suitable treatment or diagnosis of your condition. Be honest with your therapist for productive work and progress towards your desired therapeutic goals. Remember, your therapist is not here to judge you but rather to understand you, guide you in the right direction to help you improve your mental health, relationships and wellbeing. Your therapist can only work with what you choose to tell them. Don’t keep things from your therapist. If you have experienced challenges in your week, don’t pretend the week was fine, let them know. Help them to help you.
6. Participate actively
Therapy is an interactive and collaborative process. Just as your therapist is designed to show up and work with you, you need to show up and put in the work too. Showing up for your sessions consistently and regularly is important but not enough. Being in therapy is an active process not a passive one. The therapy process requires conscious effort, consistent work, follow-through and follow-up. The more work you put into resolving your issues, the more you increase the outcomes you desire. This process works best as a collaborative team effort as your therapist cannot directly ‘fix’ the issues for you and cannot do therapy ‘to you’, but rather works together with you to solve your struggles.
7. Discover life patterns and themes
As you begin to travel through the different stages of your therapy, it’s important to pay attention to overarching themes and patterns and to consider the deeper underlying issues at play. Discover and uncover your life patterns and themes, connect the dots between past and present and look at understanding how your personality, patterns of thinking, habits, coping mechanisms, and core beliefs, affect how you view yourself, others and the world. Your discoveries of your own life patterns can assist you in having a deeper understanding of how you operate different domains of your life.
8. Consider keeping a journal
Consider keeping a journal to learn more about your internal world. According to the research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it indicates that people experience both psychological and physical benefits from writing in journals. It's also been shown to help people manage stress, cope better with depression and reduce anxiety. The act of capturing thoughts and emotions on paper has shown to decrease mental distress and assist with regulation. It can help with organizing your concerns, clarify your struggles, make connections between your thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Additionally, it can enhance your self-discovery, thus increasing your insight.
9. Continue to do the work outside your session
For optimal therapeutic benefit, you will need to do your own work between sessions. Doing the work is an ongoing process both inside and outside your session. Practice the skills learnt in therapy and actively apply them to the areas that require improvement, repair, and growth. Keep your agreements, stay disciplined, and follow through with homework, recommendations and suggestions that have been advised by your therapist to help you move forward.
10. Be patient and kind to yourself
Sometimes, you may feel like you’re taking three steps forward and five steps backwards. This is normal, this is okay; as it is part of the change and growth process. If you are prone to being self-critical and impatient with yourself, try practicing some compassion for yourself instead. This can sound like, “These things can take time”, “This is new to me”, “I’m doing the best I can”, “I’m worthy of changing”, “I’m a work in progress, we all are”.
Be patient with yourself and trust the therapeutic process, even when progress is slow or uncomfortable. Your ability to take these forward steps is an integral part of the therapy process. Focus on continuous improvement, stay encouraged by this.
11. Enjoy your learning and celebrate your growth
The therapy process is designed to help you unpack your issues and in that, to re-discover and connect to parts of yourself that may have been lost. Although therapy is not a linear process and is often hard work, it does have its joyous, celebratory moments too. It is empowering to experience breakthroughs, change unhelpful habits and reduce the impact of your life-traps. Therefore, be encouraged to embrace your learnings and give yourself permission to feel the moments of joy, peace, growth and excitement that come from doing the inner work.
Final Word
In order to maximize the benefits of therapy, you need to invest in your effort and commitment to your own growth.Therapy is a collaborative process in which you and your therapist seek to create change in your life, together. By making time for introspection, and increasing self-awareness, you allow yourself room to integrate the wisdom that’s necessary for meaningful change and growth.
At Life Growth Psychology, our trained psychologists are experienced in helping you to achieve your therapeutic goals collaboratively, so that you can begin to thrive in your life. Book an appointment with us and start your journey today.
