The Actions of Psychotherapy

The actions of psychotherapy include listening, teaching and interacting.

There are many hidden teachers in our lives. All we need do is observe, reflect and incorporate what we learn. Watch a spider weave a web and you will be taught about patience, perseverance, and planning. Watch a storm and you learn that the world can be violent and dangerous. Watch the storm long enough and you find that the sun eventually comes out and does what the sun does. Bringing light, life and hope. Through counseling, you can learn ways of putting things into their proper perspective. You can learn to decipher the difference between actual threats and imagined enemies. You can learn to separate the trauma of the past from the promise of the future. And through counseling, you can learn to manage stress and reduce anxiety. You can feel and actually be better. You can learn to better weather the inevitable storms to come.

Through psychotherapy you can learn more about yourself, and thereby, learn more about the people in your life and how best to work with, or sometimes, around them. Counseling can help you to remove the obstacles that have interfered with your ability to think more clearly, to act more rationally, and to ultimately improve the way you feel and interact. The quality of your relationships can improve, even as those around you remain unchanged. Better yet, you may find that the people around you do change through and by the inspiration you provide.

What we all want is to feel that everything is alright. Think about why we are so moved by the lyrics of Bob Marley's Three Little Birds, when he sings, “cause every little thing, gonna be alright.” Or consider why Alicia Keys‘ No One, with the line, “Everything's gonna be alright,” resonates with so many of us. We all want and need to feel that we are okay and everything indeed is, or will be alright. The line between hope and denial can be a fuzzy one.

Counseling will help you to clarify that line, and to make choices based on that understanding. A good psychotherapist will never make decisions for you, but, will help to clarify your options.