THE RESULTS OF THERAPY

In the past twenty to thirty years, there has been a gradual shift away from a medical, illness-based orientation in therapy to one that focuses on personal growth.

By no means everyone enters therapy because of emotional pain. Increasingly, therapists are seeing clients who enjoy psychological and emotional good health but believe that therapy can help them lead fuller, richer, more satisfying lives.

As a consequence, the objectives of many current approaches to therapy involve more than only the resolution of personal difficulties and crises.

There are many potential benefits of therapy. To varying degrees, all the therapies we will discuss claim to assist you in achieving the following goals.

Resilience and Tolerance to Stress

As a consequence of therapy, you come to be less frustrated by stress, able to recover from stressful experiences more quickly.

• You become less defensive and more accepting of others and yourself, able to adjust more easily to unexpected demands in living.
• You have a decreased tendency to hold rigid expectations of the world, so you feel less disappointment and frustration.

Congruence

You come to be more unified in the present moment, aware of your feelings, and less disposed to ignore, deny, or distort your perceptions out of defensive needs. Congruence means a close match between what you feel and how you think and act.

Congruent people are well integrated, no longer in need of “masks.” When we admire a person’s sense of “integrity,” we often feel that the person not only behaves in ways that show self-respect, but that he or she is self-accepting, is genuine, and appears to be comparatively free of inner conflict. Such individuals are, in short, able to be themselves.

People who no longer are engaged in a battle against themselves and against others will tend to show congruence.

Self-Esteem

People with high self-esteem can allow themselves to feel modest and to behave with modesty. High self-esteem does not imply pride or arrogance. Self-esteem and self-acceptance (and hence congruence) are interrelated.

Individuals with strong self-esteem no longer need to prove themselves. They value the kind of people they are and are not inclined to be self-undermining through perfectionistic self-criticism.

Openness and Love

Ideally, if you undergo therapy, you become less defensive and less uptight about yourself; you will therefore have less need for self-absorption, so you will be able to develop an increased capacity to feel warmth for others.

• You may become more giving, and less hooked on the need to recover for what you do give, tit for tat.
• There are fewer “shoulds” to stand in your way, to use to blame yourself, or to use to criticize others.
• You can let go of these requirements and accept others for what they are, for what they can do, and for what they may feel.
• You feel less disappointment and resentment about your relationships and more of a sense of ease and peace.

Freedom

Since you are less hooked by the expectations and values of others, and you have reduced the list of requirements that others must fulfill in order to be acceptable, you gain a great measure of personal freedom. The habitual process of sizing others up and comparing them with yourself, which many of us expend so much time and energy doing, is no longer needed.

• You can more freely set your life goals.
• You will probably feel more real, meaningful satisfaction with your life, since you are no longer imprisoned by uptight standards of judgment.
• You are able to be much more relaxed because you are able to feel more accepting toward others and toward yourself.

These are among the major potential positive benefits of therapy. They make up one way of describing the ideal outcomes of therapy. They are one side of the coin; the other side consists of the many negative feelings and ways of behaving that are eliminated when they are displaced by these positive personality qualities.

Displacing the Negative with the Positive

The negatives that make up such a familiar part of “normal” life include these:

* fears that stand in the way of desired goals

* anxiety and depression that cripple normal living

* low self-esteem, resentment, and hostility that poison the formation and development of satisfying relationships

* incapacity to deal with stress, and dependence on alcohol, drugs, or other means to reduce anxiety

* inability to accept yourself, your family, or your present place in the world—which often leads to bitterness, withdrawal, and even the cultivation of fantasies that further isolate

* confusion, disorientation, and perhaps even physical signs of poor health, as a result of emotions that have assumed a magnitude that can no longer be held in check by tired defenses

 

We tend to think of these as the usual reasons for entering therapy. But, again, the positive qualities we have described are attracting clients increasingly to therapy.

Whether you need to eliminate emotional pain or are fortunate to be comparatively untroubled but are searching for certain positive qualities of perspective and character that you believe will bring increased satisfaction to your living, therapy may offer what you are seeking.