Therapy process
What can I expect from therapy?
Therapy can be a space to slow down and reflect on often long-established patterns of coping. Together, we will explore with kindness and curiosity how well these patterns still serve you.
For example, a coping pattern of ‘striving to achieve’ may have been very helpful to you at one time, but may also mean that you find it difficult to celebrate your own success or ever feel that you have done a ‘good enough’ job at something.
A pattern of focusing on the needs and feelings of others might mean that you are very good at taking care of other people, but find it less easy to notice your own emotions or even feel ‘guilty’ if you do something for yourself.
Therapy is not about saying that your patterns of coping are ‘wrong’. They are in fact understandable responses to the experiences you have had throughout your life.
Therapy is simply about working together to better notice and understand these patterns, and the areas of life where they are serving you less well. Together we can then explore how we expand your ‘repertoire’ of coping patterns, to find more helpful ways of managing that are better suited to you in the ‘here and now’.
We will usually spend our initial sessions developing a shared understanding of what has brought you to therapy and understanding more about your current coping patterns.
Some people may come to therapy with a clear idea already of their difficulty and the goals they want to achieve, for a shorter and more focused piece of work. Others may come to therapy seeking a longer-term piece of work to explore their experiences at greater depth. However, it is always important for our sessions to have a clear focus.
As such, in our early sessions we will think together about your goals and what you are hoping to gain from therapy, and agree on an approach individual to you that aligns with these goals. We will then regularly review your progress towards these goals together at agreed points in the therapy, to help us make sure that the approach we are taking continues to feel helpful in supporting you to meet these goals.
Ending therapy is also a very important part of the therapeutic process. It is something I will encourage us to plan together thoughtfully and collaboratively wherever possible. My aim is that you end therapy feeling more confident about the resources you have developed within yourself, able to draw on the skills we have developed in therapy and feeling hopeful about embarking on your next chapter.
