Psychotherapy FAQ
Can therapy help?
Yes, in most cases.
Therapy helps basically healthy people who experience the difficulties of a major life event such as the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job or home, the end of a relationship or news of serious illness. Working through these difficulties can return a person to functioning more fully and with greater peace of mind.
Therapy also helps people who experience serious depression, bipolar illness and character difficulties to learn how to maintain greater stability and manage their lives more effectively.
When you need to talk to someone, an experienced, licensed psychologist can help you get through the struggles and sufferings attached to what is overwhelming, so that you can move to a place in your life that has less suffering and more opportunity for vitality.
How hard do I have to work?
Psychotherapy is not like a visit to your medical doctor. It is collaboration between patient and therapist. This calls for an active effort on your part for a successful and satisfying outcome. Self reflective and thoughtful consideration about what we talk about outside our meetings is the active effort.
What is helping adults to grow and mature?
No one arrives in adulthood in one piece. For various reasons parts of ourselves get stuck as we develop while other parts grow to maturity without difficulty. Stuckness becomes the reason many people have gaps in their maturity or discrepancies between their chronological age and their emotional or developmental age. In effect many grown-ups need to grow up in some areas of life as life eventually requires the use of all parts of the person, even those that are waiting to be developed. Therapy helps emotional and chronological maturity get in sync so that people can grow out of their stuckness and into a place of greater well-being, relational improvement, and more self confidence.