Tracey Wilson asked:




What is Psychotherapy? Psychotherapists are not just people who give you advice. Psychotherapy is not simple problem-solving. Therapy produces change in your life, but not primarily because of advice you get from the therapist.

In reality, therapy is a much, much richer experience. Psychotherapy is a specialized technique which is effective in helping you cope with a wide range of difficulties. It can produce lasting change in your life.

“Specialized techniques of caring have been developed which have the potential to produce change in human life, even when there are deep and persistent problems.

“Psychotherapy helps individuals explore and resolve more enduring and deeply felt sources of conflict and dissatisfaction in their lives, so that they will gain confidence and inner wholeness.

“Building an alliance of trust with the therapist leads to a reshaping of significant emotional experiences, and builds confidence and wholeness in new and enduring relationships. It provides the presence of ‘personhood,’ not just technique.” –Gary Hellman

The foundation of psychotherapy is the relationship you establish with the therapist. Research has shown that the technique the therapist uses is not as important as the relationship you build together. As therapy progresses and trust is established, you will actually use the relationship between you and your therapist as a workspace, to resolve problems in your life.

Because the relationship with the therapist is so essential to the process, it is important to find a therapist to whom you feel connected, with whom you feel safe. In psychotherapy, you intentionally make yourself deeply vulnerable to another human being. That is a very frightening assignment indeed. But you must realize it is this very process of self revealing and trust building that can be the means of your healing. At the end of this frightening and difficult path lies the inner wholeness you long for.
Obviously, if you are to make yourself so vulnerable, you must feel safe. I will show you how a good therapist builds that sense of trust and safety with you.
Finding The Answer You Already Know
(You just don’t know that you know!)

There is a part of your mind, beyond your conscious awareness, that knows if your therapist is helping you. Your unconscious controls your deep emotional satisfaction, or dissatisfaction. If your therapist does something unhelpful, your unconscious knows it, and will tell you. Messages from your unconscious mind are messages from you to yourself, and you can use them to evaluate the true success of your therapy.

Of course, learning to evaluate messages from your unconscious mind can be difficult at first, since your unconscious mind communicates with the outside world only indirectly. After all, it is unconscious. The unconscious mind speaks only through dreams, and through broad themes that play themselves out through other aspects of your life.

Furthermore, your unconscious and your conscious mind often disagree. Consciously, you might think one thing; but deep inside your unconscious, your true feeling is otherwise. Nevertheless, since your unconscious mind controls your deep-seated emotional satisfaction or dissatisfaction, the unconscious mind is often the theater of psychotherapy.

“When the unconscious part of the mind communicates, it uses a conscious piece of information as a disguise for its meaning. Although we are saying one thing consciously, another meaning is being expressed unconsciously by way of the same images. In other words, when a patient in therapy tells a story or a dream, there are two levels of meaning in the images being expressed. One level is the conscious level. A story refers directly to the people and events being talked about. But a story may also contain unconscious information — that is, the details and images may pertain indirectly and unconsciously to what has taken place in the treatment experiences itself.” –Robert Langs, MD

You can use these encoded messages from your own unconscious to evaluate the success of your psychotherapy. If you examine and decode the images in your dreams and the broad themes of your stories, you can find out what your unconscious mind really thinks about your therapy — whatever therapeutic methods your therapist uses.

For instance, after a particularly satisfying therapy experience, you may dream about being held and comforted. Conversely, if someone should interrupt your therapy session, you might dream that someone is breaking into your home. Throughout the therapeutic experience, from referral to termination, you can examine your dreams and conversations for these encoded messages from your unconscious, and use them not only to know yourself in a deeper and more real way, but also to judge the effectiveness of your therapy.