As we go through some of the most common misconceptions about starting therapy, I want to reiterate that your therapy experience is unique to you. A guide to therapy is something that you may look for to avoid doing or saying something wrong. But that just isn’t the case.
It’s common to look for a guide or directions to ”succeed” in therapy but your sessions cannot be replicated or predicted.
Your therapy journey is down to what you wish to gain in your life. What would you like to change, and what you are ready to disclose to your therapist?
Our thoughts and memories are a huge jumble of emotions and feelings. When you start to look back at your life, the strongest feelings will naturally come to the surface.
What this means is:
There is no linear direction or guide to therapy.
I hear a lot of the time, that you don’t want to confuse your therapist.
But this isn’t possible.
The aim is to slowly piece together who you are and what makes you tick through several sessions. In the early days of therapy, a therapist just wants to hear about what is on your mind in that moment. They will guide you through the process, but you will always take the lead.
Your therapy space is deemed safe for a reason.
You may drive or walk to your session thinking about something you want to talk about. Once you step in though, you start to talk about something completely different.
What may feel the most important on the way to your session, isn’t what you end up signing a light on in the session.
The therapy space is a safe environment to let your emotions show their true light, but with an unbias guide alongside you.
Backtracking is encouraged.
Emotions aren’t linear and neither are our thoughts. As you lie in bed about to go to sleep, it can sometimes feel like you are thinking about twenty different things are once. That is because your mind is letting your emotions playback on what is most important to you at that time.
Therapy helps you relive those emotions to see clarity in them and truly understand them.
Through your many anecdotes that can span, months, years, or decades, you and your therapist can really get down to what makes you tick.
What if something doesn’t make sense in therapy?
If you feel like something is not making sense in a session, then that can usually give you a clear answer to how you feel about it – that it doesn’t make sense.
This is something to relay to your therapist. If something isn’t making sense, they can go through it with you to make it make sense. A lot of the time, it may not make sense because your feelings towards it are irrelevant, or you haven’t considered what you are hoping to gain from that topic.
Therapy is an environment designed to drop any inhibitions about conveying your true thoughts and feelings aloud.
Being candid only comes from throwing any chronological order out of the window.