Will I Need Therapy Forever?
Some people begin therapy with the assumption that they are in it for life. Others approach therapy hoping to get it over with as quickly as possible. At Let’s Talk! Counseling and Services, we offer therapy in Orlando, and online therapy in Florida, that doesn’t have to last forever.
Reasons why you may think you need “forever therapy”:
You don’t feel like you have supportive relationships outside of therapy.
You feel like you can’t be authentic or honest with people in your life, the way you are with your therapist.
People have told you that your problems are chronic and permanent by saying things like “Depression is a chemical imbalance, so you’ll have it your whole life.“ While it’s true there are biological components of depression, the assertion that it’s therefore permanent is not necessarily accurate.
You’ve felt so bad for so long that you simply can’t imagine things getting better, much less better enough to handle things on your own.
You believe you are simply too broken to manage your life for yourself.
Your therapist has provided more support and guidance leading you to feel more dependent on your therapist, as opposed to teaching you new coping skills and resolving old wounds and patterns that keep you stuck. The latter gives you the opportunity to maintain things on your own outside of therapy.
Your therapy has been focused on the wrong issue. Working on a “surface level” issue while leaving a deeper problem untouched may make you feel better temporarily, but it can’t last if the deeper issues aren’t resolved.
If any of these sound familiar, you’ve probably been in therapy for a long time. Or else, you’ve tried therapy and gave it up when it felt like you weren’t getting anywhere. Or perhaps, you’ve avoided therapy altogether because you believe it would go on forever and you simply can’t afford that either financially or emotionally.
Fortunately, we don’t believe therapy should last forever. We offer therapy in Orlando and online throughout Florida for clients who are hoping to finish therapy with the skills to maintain progress on their own. Here are a few of the elements we incorporate to ensure you make it to the finish line:
For those who lack supportive relationships, we will explore things that have gotten in the way of building supportive relationships outside of therapy so we can work through these obstacles one at a time. Every client should have at least a few healthy supportive relationships before ending therapy, otherwise they’ll be right back where they started before long.
If you aren’t sure how to be yourself with others, we will focus on tools for building authenticity in your life and in your relationships. This might mean clarifying your values and what really matters to you so that you can be more honest with yourself first and foremost. It also usually involves slowly learning to be vulnerable with people in your life who prove themselves to be trustworthy because greater authenticity leads to feeling safer in your relationships.
For those who worry their condition is permanent, we approach treatment with an organized plan to achieve remission and we don’t stop there. The vast majority of the most common mental health conditions are highly treatable and can be put into remission such as depression and anxiety disorders. Under stress, there is a higher chance the symptoms may pop back up, which is why we help our clients to craft Relapse Prevention Plans to decrease the odds of falling back into the same pattern over and over again.
For those of you who’ve been struggling for so long you’ve lost hope, we focus on the easiest steps for improvement first, to get a little relief as soon as possible. This means focusing on simple skills you can practice on your own to help get your symptoms under control sooner.
For those who worry that struggle is in your DNA - we don’t believe people are inherently broken or defective no matter how much they are struggling. While many of our clients come to us feeling hopeless, we believe no one is beyond help.
For clients who’ve gone from a “helicopter parent” to a “helicopter therapist”, we will encourage you to master skills on your own outside of session. We provide support for our clients, but we believe effective therapy should go beyond that. We also stay away from offering advice or acting as your expert decision maker. Instead we focus on supporting clients to make their own decisions, learning to weigh options, identify resources, and cope with the anxiety of learning to guide their own lives. That way, you can take it with you after therapy ends.
To avoid leaving deeper issues unresolved, we begin therapy by creating what is known as a case conceptualization. This helps us to see how your daily symptoms relate to deeper issues. Deeper issues may involve past trauma, unhealthy coping patterns, or core beliefs you developed early in life. When treating depression for example, if we increase your daily activity and social connection, but never talk about the unresolved grief that led to the start of your depression, it’s likely to come back the next time you experience any kind of loss, even minor ones.
We can help.
If you or someone you love is struggling with anxiety, depression, or the effects of trauma, please reach out. We offer CBT Therapy in Orlando and online throughout the state of Florida. Call today or send us your info and we’ll reach out for a free consultation to see if one of our therapists would be a good fit.
