Mind Healing Counselling

Therapy is all about blaming one’s parents.

The most common misconception is that therapy absolves the client of personal responsibility and instead blames the client's parents. In fact, an effective therapy seeks the inverse. True, many therapists believe that one's early caregivers significantly influence who we are in relationships today.

Many things we learn from those relationships, including how we elicit care, what we can expect from others, our willingness to trust, our sense of how to act when someone is angry with us, how much of our own anger can be tolerated, how we perceive ourselves, our experience of succeeding and failing, how we manage envy and being envied, and so on. However, therapy can assist us in working through difficult relationships and our perceptions of poor or unfair treatment, such as feeling hurt, dismissed, misunderstood, or unloved.

Yes, these memories and experiences bring, with them, feelings of rage, sadness, guilt, shame, and a slew of other emotions associated with parents. For genuine and long-term change, a person must confront these insights about the past and ultimately accept responsibility for the troubling behaviours that resulted from it. The helpless sorrow we often feel in psychotherapy is replaced by problem-solving.

Therapy is a self-indulgent activity.

Therapy is about acknowledging our needs and desires, but it is not about encouraging selfishness. In reality, when we feel free to meet our own needs, we are less likely to exploit others and more capable of loving and being generous. I've seen people become more engaged with the world as therapy progresses. The desire to give back manifests itself through volunteer work, creativity, kind gestures, and openness, no longer consumed by worry, depression, anger, or distrust.

"Going there" aggravates the situation.

Revisiting the past or a difficult period in our lives may be quite stressful. Clients have described it as "opening a can of worms/ Pandoras’sbox," "uncorking a tornado," "feeding the monster," and "choking on an undigested hairball" over the years. We fear disintegrating or "going to bits" when suppressed or repressed feelings resurface. We're concerned that we'll become so enraged that we won't be able to forgive someone close to us. In other words, we'll get caught in the agony.

Indeed, things might sometimes get worse before they get better. After all, we've often decided not to think about particular events, relationships, or sentiments because they were too overwhelming or confusing, whether deliberately or unconsciously. However, in my experience, talking about those complicated feelings with someone who is caring and inquiring about the trauma and making sense of it helps people let go of the weight they've carried and feel better.

To untangle the knots, we must occasionally unravel. It can be re-traumatizing if someone isn't ready, is pushed too hard, or isn't appropriately supported. On the other hand, a qualified therapist will take their client's cues regarding a manageable pace and safely guide them through painful material.

Therapy is a one-way conversation.

The therapist is never passive, even if they are quiet at times. Deep listening and meaning-making take place while therapists are silent. Although the therapist may be an expert, they do not claim special access to the truth. This is not the same as a technician-like therapist who already knows the answers and just requires you to "follow the directions."

Giving counsel and prescribing behaviours is far easier than practising the self-discipline of speaking only when you believe it will pull the client out or lead to better insight. It can be aggravating when therapists ask questions rather than give answers, but they do it to understand the client better and encourage them to dig deeper into themselves, their behaviours, and the meaning of their symptoms.

Giving advice and knowledge may make the therapist happy, but it doesn't respect the client's autonomy. The purpose of therapy is to increase that sense. Most people, in my experience, don't actually want counsel; they just want to be understood. Even if a therapist had a crystal ball with all the therapeutic remedies, the truth of the client's experience has to come from the client, or else it's pointless.

Therapy is for people with a mental illness.

Human misery is all around us. Nobody is immune to it. People seek treatment when they are unable to function in the outside world. However, even if an adult appears to be working normally, they may be in pain and require therapy.

People seek treatment for various reasons, including anxiety, depression, grief, anger, adjusting to life changes, interpersonal issues, low self-esteem, and substance misuse. If these symptoms are not addressed, they may worsen. Accepting that we require assistance from others often necessitates a certain level of emotional maturity and fortitude. Effective therapy can help us grow into our best selves and live more completely, not just by reducing our symptoms.

Therapy must be called “evidence-based.”

Regrettably, the general public has become caught in the crossfire of the Psychotherapy Wars. On the one hand, some people believe that tactics are the cure-all. Those who feel that relationship aspects are the healing components are in the opposing group. These are therapists who focus on sensitive empathy, rapport, active listening, and meaning-making to help their clients. The therapy focuses on assisting clients in better understanding their feelings and behaviours, whilst increasing their self-worth, improving their relationships, and forming their identities.

We all desire treatments that have been proven to be effective. The good news is that most mainstream therapies are backed up by research. The bad news is that the word "evidence-based," like "healthy choice" on packaged foods, is being utilized as a marketing technique.

The term "evidence-based therapy" can be applied to many therapy styles. Meta-analytic analyses that sift through a significant quantity of data from a variety of studies demonstrate that relationship aspects, not exercises or skills, are what drives effective psychotherapy (Norcross, 2011).

The bottom line is that most therapies do not neatly fit into either category. In the actual world, therapists tend to tailor their techniques to the specific demands of each client. Therapy that prioritizes depth, relationship, and understanding is better suited to helping people transform long-term dysfunctional behaviours and complicated emotional difficulties.