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The benefits of therapy extend beyond moments of crisis and many people in therapy explore how they can be the most productive, happiest, and most loving version of themselves. A therapist can help you in achieving your full potential and best version of yourself, something that will require
tremendous self control, self-knowledge, and it’s best done when you’re not also coping with a personal crisis.
Furthermore, if there’s something in your life that’s indeed a concern, it’s prudent to deal with it straight away and not place it on the back burner. Since what’s minor today can snowball into a crisis left unaddressed, the sooner you see a therapist and get it all out there with introspection, the better off you are in the long run.
I realize the idea of probing and contemplating your thoughts, fears, and aspirations with someone who initially is a stranger – a therapist – may sound daunting, but that is exactly the value in doing it. Truly effective therapy is going to naturally feel uncomfortable – at first. One dimension of effective therapy is to challenge and hold you accountable, not enable or coddle any unhealthy behaviors you wish to change and that may have brought you into therapy in the first place.
When to consider therapy?
Before you decide you’re ready for therapy, take some time for personal reflection. The American Psychological Association advises a time to consider seeing a therapist is when something interferes with some part of life causing distress, particularly when:
If you’re experiencing any of the following feelings or emotions to the measure that they interfere with life, therapy can reverse things and get you back on a healthy track.
Mind Body & Spirit specializes in individual, couples, and family therapy. The therapists at Mind Body Spirit are experienced in unearthing and talking through a vast array of subjects, from resolving long-term challenges in family dynamics to work-place stress. We have seasoned
therapists who will work with you to forge a therapeutic relationship founded on trust and commitment to respecting your privacy. 4 personal skills that you will gain in your experience with us are as follows:
We understand acknowledging emotions and feelings can be difficult, make us feel uncomfortable and vulnerable – or may be something we simply don’t know how to do. Know that in speaking with a therapist, exploring feelings is very important and can form the heart of a therapy session.
When you bottle up and suppress emotions, whether it’s sadness, anger, frustration or grief, they can overwhelm you, eventually harming your mental and physical health. Regardless of the reason, suppressed feelings can manifest themselves in escapist behavior (like excessive drinking an eating junk food). When you refrain from expressing negative emotions, you’re not shedding them from your life – you’re simply storing them further back in your head to build and build. Bottle up your emotions and you become a shaken can of soda. You can keep the suppressed emotions stored for a long time, but eventually, you will explode, with all those bottled up emotions pouring out.
A therapist is going to help you develop a skill set to enable you to process feelings and past events, which will help keep them from resurfacing down the line in the form of anger, depression, or emotional distress. Our approach and therapies are generally rooted on open conversations, streams of consciousness, and neutral exchanges. Effective emotional
processing requires mindfulness — or personal awareness of your feelings and emotions without judging yourself for having them. So even if you’re unfamiliar with releasing and sharing your emotions, know that we’re here to support and guide you along your journey.
Expressing your thoughts out loud, as opposed to keeping them to yourself, allows you to contemplate in a deeper way. Simply talking and saying what is on your mind to another person will help you consider your thoughts in a more realistic way and gain a more complete understanding of how they impact your life. Your therapist may also offer a new perspective, or insight that you’ve not considered. Be aware our minds commonly dramatize worst-case scenarios left to our own devices. But by exploring your thoughts and feelings with a therapist they are challenged and ‘grounded’. A voice of prudence is helpful in realizing there’s no cause for worry.
When you are experiencing intense emotions — particularly anxiety, fear, or aggression — your fight or flight response system takes control, determines if something is threatening and a response necessary, and then places that information in your memory so you can recognize the threat in the future. When overwhelmed or stressed, this part of your brain can take control overriding more logical thinking.
Research indicates that putting your emotions into words — a process called “affect labeling” — can reduce your fight or flight response system’s ability to take control when you encounter upsetting things or experience intense emotions. This is how over a series of therapeutic sessions where you are speaking to your therapist, you can become less stressed from feelings you
experience and things you encounter. For example, if you got stuck in an elevator for even just a few minutes, using an elevator afterward could be emotionally overwhelming. But as you talk through your experience, process what happened by putting your feelings into words, you will
develop the ability to apply more logical thinking when encountering elevators and use them again without feeling emotionally overwhelmed.
Maybe you’re just feeling stuck and can’t shake a looming sense that you’ve lost touch with who you are or the career path you’ve been pursuing isn’t what you want after all. Often When our circumstances change, we may struggle with redefining our purpose and can feel unfulfilled as a
result. Feeling a lack of purpose or little direction can affect all aspects of your life, leading to anxiety, distress, and depression. Setting goals and defining your purpose can instill confidence and help you live a more fulfilled and content life. When life’s got you feeling overwhelmed and
depleted, a clear purpose and direction can bring you peace of mind and help restructure obstacles into opportunities for personal growth and renewed motivation.
Because its meaning must resonate with your heart and soul, a purpose in life is determined solely by you. However much of the self-reflection required to arrive at our life’s purpose can be challenging to explore alone and this is where a therapist can be helpful. A therapist is trained to guide you through your journey in identifying your purpose as that path may uncover internal anxieties, fears, and other issues. A therapist can help navigate, and impart to you the skills to overcome any emotional or mental roadblocks – thereby allowing you to embrace your true path to the fullest.
Additionally in conjunction with finding your purpose, goal setting acts as a roadmap and can help you face emotional and behavioral difficulties, reconnect with old friends, help you look for a new job or simply help you save for a vacation. Therapy will guide you on how to approach goal
planning strategically by breaking things down into smaller more manageable steps. Setting goals in therapy is accepting responsibility for your life and taking active steps to make a change. Always know your purpose can actually shift and change throughout life in response to the
evolving priorities and fluctuations of your own experiences.
Coping skills are positive and productive ways to react to mental health issues and life’s stressful situations, whether it’s not getting the promotion you deserve, anxiety about driving, or the death of a loved one. Learning healthy coping skills is essential because it teaches us how to deal with difficulties while building our personal resiliency. Resiliency refers to how quickly a person is able to recover from a difficult situation, or in other words, how quickly and easily they bounce back after a career setback or when a loved one dies – for example. Highly resilient people learn to spot and process difficult and troubling experiences by acknowledging their mistakes if any, learning from the situation, and turning the page. Therapists help foster the natural coping skills everyone has and they will look slightly different from person to person because we’re all unique.
Healthy coping skills become part of your ‘self-care toolbox’, and enable you to recognize threatening situations in their infancy and diffuse them before they become more serious. Coping skills come in two basic classifications: 1) problem-focused and; 2) emotion-focused.
Understanding their distinctions helps determine the best to apply to any given the situation.
Problem-focused coping is viable when a change in your situation is needed and you remove the source of stress from your life. For instance, if you’re in a toxic relationship, removing that influence from your life establishes a new boundary and can be relieving. Problem-focused coping
resolves exterior factors causing mental health problems. Emotion-focused coping is viable to care for your personal wellness when you can’t change what stresses you, such as the death of a loved one or a traumatic event. The approach is to regulate your emotional response and
feelings to the problem instead of addressing the problem. Examples in practice are journaling, meditation, and talk therapy.
In therapy you will learn to recognize internal and external stressors and create strategies for coping with both in positive ways. Though coping skills are generally addressed as a reactive strategy, research indicates proactive coping strategies can effectively manage obstacles you’re likely to face in life going forward.
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