Therapy: For Growth!
“I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago, that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed, not anxious, not angry, that I’d make them happy. It turns out the skills of happiness are different from the skills of relieving misery.”
Therapy: Not Just to Alleviate Mental Illness
In my experience as a therapist, most people think of therapy as a way to alleviate distress, to recover from a mental health issue, like depression or anxiety. And, in that, they would be absolutely correct. Therapy can be and is used to successfully help people recover from a whole range of specific mental health issues, from low mood, to OCD, PTSD, and Social Phobia, amongst many others.
But, therapy in my view is this, and so much more! As a therapist, I have had a number of journeys in different forms of therapy, even though I didn’t have a mental health issue as such, and yet, these journeys were incredibly valuable and helped drastically improve my life. But, if I wasn’t using therapy to recover, what was I using it for?
Well, I was using it for growth!
Therapy for Growth!
Maybe we don’t have any specific mental health issue that we need to alleviate, but, we find ourselves still wanting more from our life. Martin Seligman, in the video here, describes how improving our happiness, and not just reducing our suffering, means increasing one or more of three separate things:
Our levels of pleasure
Our levels of engagement in activity
Our levels of meaning and purpose in life
Each one of these areas has different degrees of lasting happiness, but all three are important if we want to be happier. We can use therapy to learn the skills, techniques, and attitudes essential for improving each of these areas.
Such changes can be broken down into three parts of life:
Personal Development
In order to make big changes in our lives, many of us need to develop certain internal, psychological skills that we might currently lack. For each person this might be different, as we all have our strengths and weaknesses. For example, a person might need to develop the capacity to focus, which might require practising certain mindfulness techniques. Another person, however, might need to develop the ability to take risks, in order to enable them to try new things. A third person might need to develop communication skills in order to improve the relationships in their life. Therapy can be a massive form of support in that area, as a well-trained, experienced therapist will have a host of tools and techniques to help an individual learn different psychology skills, if needed.
Life Development
Personal development is important, but sometimes the change we are looking for is a change in our lives. Maybe we are unhappy with our job, but struggle to take the leap into the unknown of a new career. Maybe we want to take up new hobbies, but have no idea where to start, or even what we like! Perhaps we want to be more social, to join clubs in our area, but find ourselves stuck in a rut of routine and never getting round to it. Here, making life changes can be hard because we already have a lifestyle that is very familiar, and full of habits and routines that can be hard to break. For sure, research has shown how powerful habits, good or bad, can be, and therapy can help with breaking old habits and creating new ones, using techniques that have been shown to promote behavioural change.
In this way me might start doing more things that increase our experiences of pleasure, engagement, and meaning, which in turn can increase our happiness!
Spirituality (Finding Meaning in Something Bigger)
Martin Seligman also mentions in his video the importance not just of pleasure, or engagement in activity, but also, finding meaning and purpose in something bigger than ourselves. Here, we might feel totally lost on where to start, and therapy can be a great way to begin to explore questions like “what’s the point?”, “why am I here?”, and, “what do I want to do with my life? What’s worthwhile?” Often, we might need to begin by seriously asking: “What are my values, and, am I living them authentically?” These are tough questions, and harder to think through on our own, and though a therapist can’t give you any solutions to these questions, a good therapist can certainly help you find your own answers.
Everything is Connected
For sure, all the above areas - personal development, life development, and finding meaning - are all interconnected, in the same way pleasure, engagement with activity, and finding meaning in something bigger are also connected, a good, growthful therapy experience covers all of these, when necessary. When doing this, we find that therapy can not only be used to reduce certain forms of distress, but it can actually be used to radically increase life-satisfaction!
Therapy, then, is not only a way to address mental health issues. Therapy is a way to not only maximise the reduction of misery, but also increase our experience of happiness.
But. what do you think? If you were to use therapy to explore any of the above areas, what would you use it for, and why? Feel free to comment below!