Research shows more than a quarter of North American adults experience depression, anxiety or other affective and emotional illnesses in a given year. Many of us who may not be suffering from a diagnosable illness need help coping with various other difficulties such as work and workplace stresses and anxiety, loss of loved ones, coping with physical illness, losing weight or stopping smoking. Still others struggle to cope with relationship troubles, job loss, daily stresses, substance abuse or other issues. These challenges can demand immense amounts of emotional resources and energy, and they can seriously interfere with the normal flow of our lives. The loss of a loved one may lead to a dark place of grief and suffering; a marital breakdown may become a spiraling path to emotional despair and career disaster; and an adolescent’s difficulties at school may grow to feel like a hopelessly impossible disaster threatening the entire family structure. Therapeutic consultation helps you deal with these situations. But more importantly, it prevents life challenges from developing into significant and overwhelming psychological problems.
One of the most common experiences that signals you might need psychotherapy is when you feel the forces of chaos or patterns beyond your reach seem to have a larger portion of control on your life, your success, your thoughts, your feelings and your relationships than you yourself. These are the times when you feel you are doing all that you know how to do, in order to avoid stress, avoid tension with people around you, stay in control, avoid financial disasters or emotional and relationship upheavals, and yet disorder seems to have a hidden passage through which it finds its way back into your life every time to undermine your struggles and to undo what you have tried so hard to weave together.
Psychological growth is not just about finding one’s way out of mental illness and emotional disasters. Psychotherapy is about living better. It is often about a way of finding and hearing, and sometimes healing and recovering, our own inner self, the inner voice of wisdom about our life -the life that nobody knows as well as we do, and therefore nobody will ever be able to steer and move it forward as we can. This is an important thing to understand about psychotherapy: it is not a way of replacing your inner voice with someone else’s, it’s a way of finding it, fostering it, recovering it, and giving it the strength that it needs to come forward and flourish and to lead you forward.
Yes, that is possible!
