How does psychotherapy help?
Psychotherapy can help you
learn more about yourself
achieve your goals
have more fulfilling relationships
assist you having better health and
improve all areas of your life.
How does psychotherapy do all that?
Psychotherapy is a means to address emotional difficulties, life challenges and mental health concerns. Psychotherapy is a mirroring and attachment-based relationship that enables you to enhance the way you see yourself. It provides a means to understand your life situations from multiple perspectives. Psychotherapy provides insight into your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. It assists you in developing coping skills to deal with stress, depression, anxiety and more.
Relationship
For me, a foundational principle of psychotherapy is that it is a supportive, accepting, and nonjudgmental relationship that enables you to develop a new relationship with yourself. This is done through replicating an accepting relationship with another, who can reflect to you how you see yourself, as well as who you are. This healthy attachment then provides a new grounding for one’s self view which can respond to challenges and life questions. Through this grounding, you can begin to answer questions about yourself, others, and the challenges you face, and develop a stronger self-image. This becomes the steppingstone to responding to life rather than reacting to life.
Often, we have experienced difficult relationships with attachment figures in our life. A healthy psycho-therapeutic relationship can aid in understanding past difficult relationships and begin to build healthier new ones, to one-self and others.
Perspective
Psychotherapy provides a means of sharing your story, experiences and views and putting them into perspective. This enables one to develop healthier responses to relationships, behaviours and emotions that often cloud our worldview. As part of this, the education around why we act and develop responses to situations can bring in new insights to problematic patterns and remove our self-judgement. This then becomes a bridge to understanding how to change our reactions to responses.
Thus, psychotherapy brings understanding to your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours so that you can make changes in your life from an informed view of self and world.
Coping
Psychotherapy provides methods of improving coping skills that help you deal with thoughts, feelings, and actions. This is about changing our responses step by step and building new ways of dealing with stress and life.
As an art therapist and body-oriented therapist, I bring in new ways of addressing your past and creating skills for the future. I will use talk, narrative sharing, imagery, mindfulness, expression, journaling, body-awareness and more, to help you identify the positive and negative responses that are happening in your life. I will also use the same tools to help you see your responses in a new way. And as part of the coping tools to deal with life. This is one reason that therapy is so effective, that the effects of being seen, developing self-understanding, self-awareness, and coping skills, are long-lasting, even after ending the psycho-therapeutic relationship.
Psychotherapy is a laboratory for you to explore, experiment and practice behaviours which will help you Bloom and thrive. It can be for a couple of sessions or for ongoing self-care. Psychotherapy can address significant mental health concerns, or short-term issues. It is a means to help you realize your potential, improve your quality of life, and feel confident in your daily life.
Psychotherapy is one of the best treatments for mental health. This statement is supported by 50 years’ worth of research (Lambert, M. J. (Ed.). (2013). Bergin and Garfield's handbook of psychotherapy and behavior change.)
Contact me for a free phone consultation to see if we can work together to help you live a more Blooming life.
Deb, 416-312-1636, info@bloominglife.ca
