Party of 1: The truth about change in therapy
Picture this: You’ve been in therapy for a few months. Together with your therapist, you’ve learned new coping skills and started to challenge some of that unhelpful thinking that has left you feeling stuck or hopeless in the past. Armed with your new set of tools and strategies, you show up to a big family dinner expecting everything to be different. Halfway through the night - after you’ve watched your partner still stare at their phone, or watched your mom get into an argument with her sister - you realize - nothing has changed at all! But then something else happens. You notice that despite all the chaos around you, you are actually ok. You’re still frustrated and annoyed but you haven’t been drawn into another pointless argument or even raised your voice. At the end of the night, you leave - flabbergasted. The situation has stayed the same, but you have changed.
To some, this is a liberating realization. For others, it is terrifying. What happens when I change but the people around me stay the same? Don’t they have to change, too? The short answer is: to see benefits and experience growth in therapy, the only thing that needs to change is you.
As a therapist, I work with people who come to me looking for a change. Often they come in expecting that at the end of the process, their lives will look different, or some big miracle will have occurred. What they learn is one of the most beautiful and terrifying parts of therapy; your circumstances and the people around you don’t have to change for you to experience radical growth and transformation in your own life.
Learn more by visiting these popular resources:
https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/issues/change