How can psychotherapy benefit me?
Increasing awareness and capacity for introspection
Psychotherapy strives to provide us with insight to the unconscious motivations for our behavior and the unconscious sources of our emotional experience. Such awareness in turn enhances our ability to make choices in our lives. Initially insight is achieved through interpretations on the part of the therapist, but the broader goal is to develop the patient's own ability to introspect and connect his or her experiences with their subconscious context.
Shifting from avoidance to experience
When mental pain is perceived as unbearable and destabilizing , we will be willing to do anything to not experience it - including employing costly, reality-distorting defense-mechanisms. Psychotherapy strives to expand our field of experience to include areas previously considered too dangerous for us to acknowledge and integrate into the core of our selves. This goal is achieved through the gradual processing of the painful content, alongside strengthening the personality.
Refining relationship patterns
Each of us has a (mostly unconscious) perception about possible types of interpersonal relationships, which has been formulated by past experiences. When we enter into a new relationship, our automatic tendency is to associate it with one of the patterns we are familiar with. Our unconscious expectation, that the next relationship will be similar to previous ones, may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, if our childhood was characterized by mostly negative interpersonal relationships, we may have difficulty identifying opportunities for relationships of a positive nature, establishing them, and believing that they are real when they transpire. Psychotherapy familiarizes us with our internal relationship patterns by having us observe them, and no less importantly - having us notice how they subconsciously strive to manifest in the relationship with the therapist (a process known in psychology as 'transference'). Alongside this endeavor, the treatment itself provides us with a felt sense of a relationship based on empathy, trust, authenticity, mutual respect and healthy boundaries, making it more feasible for us to take part in such relationships outside the therapy room.
Improving self-image
We all perceive ourselves in a certain way. If during our childhood we did not have our strengths, resources and positive qualities adequately reflected to us, and even more so if we were mistreated, it is likely we would have developed negative self-image and low self-worth. Therapy is a great place to rediscover our good qualities.
Consolidating one's identity
We all have a narrative about who we are and how we got here, which is the basis for our sense of identity. When this narrative isn’t properly established, we lack a clear sense of who we are. We know parts, but have a hard time assembling the whole. In other cases the narrative may be coherent but negative, for example: "My life is a long series of failures" (ignoring surviving hardships, which would have broken many others). In therapy we have an opportunity to get to know ourselves better and rewrite our life story in a more comprehensive and compassionate way.