About the Helping Therapy Work Blog Series
Therapy can be mysterious and confusing, especially if you have never been in therapy before. This makes sense. Clients often have questions about how to make the best use of therapy. This, too, makes sense. You are investing your time and money with the hopes of therapy improving your life. It is important to be informed and make the best of your time in therapy.
The purpose of this blog series is twofold. First, it is intended to take the mystery out of therapy and help you figure out how to make the best use of your time in therapy. However, at the outset, I want to point out that what you can do to help therapy work varies some from therapist to therapist. Some aspects, such as developing a good relationship with your therapist and being honest about your experience, is important with most approaches to therapy. Yet, other aspects may vary depending upon the type of therapy and your therapist. This blog series, of course, will focus largely on how to help therapy work from my perspective and aspects of it may not apply to all types of therapy and all therapists. Over time, I hope to invite other therapists to also contribute short blogs to this series. My goal is to keep all of the blogs very short, so that they can be read them in 5 to 15 minutes.
As a therapist, scholar, and researcher for over 20-years, I have witnessed the path to change with many different people. Each person has their own unique path and no solution works for everyone. I often tell students and clients alike to be leery of anyone who thinks they have the answer for everyone or who believes they are the right fit for every client. Over the years I have studied, researched, and published scholarship on what works in therapy. There are some themes that do emerge over time and I have discovered other things that are helpful through my own experience as a therapist. Yet, I have also learned that one of the most important things I can do in therapy is honor the client’s individual path and recognize that I will always need to adapt my approach to the particular person I am working with. Through this blog series, I will share some of these lessons in a way that hopefully will help consumers of therapy find ways to make therapy work for them.
The second purpose of this blog is to offer perspectives on various topics related to mental health. I believe in a holistic approach to mental health. As part of this perspective, I believe an individual’s psychological health and well-being is connected to their physical health, their relationships, their work, and various other aspects of their life. Additionally, I believe therapy is more successful if the therapy consumer is committed to personal growth beyond therapy. As part of this, I will also include blogs that may be helpful for individuals in considering their own commitment to personal growth on a variety of topics. I am a blogger for GoodTherapy.org. Many of the posts focusing on personal growth beyond therapy will be brief overviews of the blogs published on GoogTherapy.org with a link to the blog.
For those who are just interested in the posts on Making Therapy Work, there is a tag you can click on to only view the blogs with this focus. For those who are only interested in the blogs on Personal Growth, there is a tag you can click on to only see those blogs.