Starting Psychotherapy
Everyone starts at the beginning for their own life fresh with little more than hopes and dreams.
Psychotherapy helps people enjoy life more fully through better choices and decisions.
Life is surprising, exciting, confusing, demanding, frightening and rewarding.
The future questions us.
What’s your map, your direction, your territory ? We all need resources, options, skills, and allies on the journey. How do we start exploring our choices in the rush of daily events?
We hear these questions and more, and have some answers to many of them.
Usually we come to therapy after years of feeling unknown to ourselves as persons in our own right. Some of our journey has been difficult, unkind, unsupported, disturbing and lonely. We may have lost ones we loved, in broken relationships.
Often we feel that time has passed us by, that we cannot make life any better.
We may have become desperate after short-term bouts of CBT by your work-place have been ineffective.
Our experience is that even one hour a week creates meaningful long-term results because good therapy is self-directed learning and your therapist hopes you will become independent of their professional help by being more of you.
We always need a map when we want to get a sense of direction in unknown territory. What landmarks are prominent? What dol need to keep in mind if l wish to travel this or that route? When people come to therapy, they usually want to have a map.
There are 8760 hours in a year and our data gained over 30 years shows that most people only manage to find time for 35 to 42 hours to repair and restore the habits of past years of being.
External data show convincingly that roughly 40 hours of face-to-face contact with a reliably trained therapist are required for most people to experience meaningful changes in their understanding of their lives.
In truth, the 12 sessions a year benefit plan provided in most Canadian companies are simply inadequate to provide real growth. That's really 8 hours a year based on a standard 45 minute meeting. That’s why most sessions lack depth and empathy.
And if you are an employee you are paying out of your salary to fund a third-party provider to sell ‘benefits’. The provider runs a business called ‘benefits’ and it bets that most employees won’t be eager to entrust sensitive personal information that may affect their careers. So it’s smart to see your therapy as an investment cost in your personal independence, just as if you were running your own start-up amd getting in the valuable time to get launched.
If you pay your therapist directly, you get to deduct such fees from your Canadian medical personal tax return. You stay in control at the speed you need.
Big changes and real growth take some time, spring shoots may yield tall trees if we follow our growing awareness in this dialogue well.
Looking ahead and behind makes our passage through time/life more sure and revealing. Therapy is not a short hasty blip in time, nor a dreary necessity to last forever.