7 Tips to Get the Most Out of Therapy
1) Have tangible goals
Having tangible goals will help you and your provider know that you are making progress and are moving towards recovery. When you are thinking about your goals, try to think beyond, “I don’t want to feel [insert undesirable feeling].” While therapy can certainly change the way we feel, it will never take away undesirable feelings completely. All feelings are important and we need them all!
To make therapeutic goals, instead think about what you would be doing differently if your struggles were reduced. What would you be doing more of? What would you be doing less of? How would your day-to-day look different? What would be happening differently six months from now?
A bit of a warning when thinking about goals: In individual therapy, your therapist can only help YOU change. Many of us go to therapy in hopes that the therapist can give us some magic words that will make our toxic families, social circles, relationships, or coworkers change. While a therapist can definitely teach you ways to create boundaries, have healthy communication, and manage conflict, they can’t teach those things to the toxic people who are not in the session. When you go to therapy for change, remember you are the person that will change and that can feel both hard and incredibly liberating!
2) Think about how you want your therapy sessions to look
Do you want therapy to be a space where you have a confidential person to talk to and can process through all your thoughts and feelings? Do you want therapy to be more of a space where you learn and practice skills? Do you want “homework”? Do you like worksheets? To get the most out of therapy, tell your provider how you want your sessions to look. A good provider should be able to adjust for you.
3) The whole truth and nothing but the truth
This may seem obvious, but please tell your therapist about all your struggles, even the ones you feel shame about. This includes struggles with things like sleep, eating, body image, sex, substances, self harm, and suicidality. Most seasoned therapists have heard it all and are generally unshockable. When you share all your struggles, your therapist can have a big picture of what is actually going on and best help you.
In addition, be honest with your therapist if therapy isn’t working. The path to recovery is not a straight line and you and your therapist might need to make some adjustments along the way. Your therapist might adjust treatment by asking you to try new techniques or they might recommend medication or seeing another type of provider. Sometimes our expectations of how quick recovery will happen doesn’t match reality. This can be frustrating and disappointing. However, talking to your therapist about setting reasonable expectations for progress can be helpful.
4) Jot down what you want to talk about throughout the week
While some more structured therapists may have an agenda for your session, many rely on you to create the agenda based on what struggles happened between sessions. Therefore, it can help the speed of recovery by jotting down what you want to talk about during the next session. Note times that you were struggling and what triggered it. Jot down the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors you had during that struggle. Also take note of when things were going well. As much as recovery is about reducing struggles, it is also about increasing joy!
5) Bring your “C” game to every session
Curiosity is essential in therapy. Having curiosity is often the first step to being open to trying new things, thinking about different perspectives, and feeling less stuck in unhelpful patterns. When we are feeling depressed or anxious, it can be easy to dismiss suggestions to try new strategies. Challenge yourself to think of therapy as a bit of an experiment where you get to test different strategies that might help. Cultivate some curiosity around trying something new and you might be surprised by your results!
6) Practice makes therapy helpful
Your therapist will often ask you to practice different skills outside of session. Rewiring the brain takes lots of repetition. You may not feel relief from skills right away. That’s normal! Give it time and keep practicing. If you have ever learned a new skill, like playing a sport or learning an instrument, there is a big learning curve in the beginning that only gets easier with practice. If you are struggling with practicing the skills outside of sessions, tell your therapist! They might give you a new skill, help you reflect on your motivation, or make adjustments.
7) Discuss if your therapist hurts your feelings
Therapists are human too and we will accidentally at times say the wrong thing. Learning how to address hurt feelings in a safe environment is one of the most important gifts of therapy. So, if your therapist says something that feels hurtful or doesn’t quite sit right, bring that up with them! A good therapist will not be hurt and instead will be happy that you brought this up. When our hurt feelings are deeply listened to and accepted, we can feel validated and more confident to bring up hurts outside of the therapy office. In therapy speak, we call this a “corrective experience.” Therapy can be so helpful because it allows us to try out new ways of relating to other people in a safe environment.
Elizabeth Neri, MPH, LCSW, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Anxiety Specialists of Atlanta.Ms. Neri is passionate about demystifying therapy. She believes that transparency about the therapeutic process is an essential ingredient for everyone having a transformative experience in therapy. Ms. Neri specializes in using experiential and mindfulness-based approaches in therapy and draws predominantly from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, trauma-informed approaches, social justice frameworks, systems theory, and attachment-based models.
