About Therapy

What to Expect in Therapy

If you’ve never been to therapy before, it can seem like a process shrouded in mystery, causing many questions to pop into your head. You don’t know what to expect in therapy.

Does therapy require me to lie on a couch? Do you practice mind control while working with me? Will I cry all the time, or is there a secret handshake? (Answers: No, No, No, and No).

Therapy, while magical in its results, is relatively straightforward.

When you come to see me for therapy, in the first session we start with an assessment. I will ask you many nosy questions to understand what you have been through, what you tried – what worked and failed to work, and what factors are playing into the difficulties you have now.

We’ll talk about how you want your life to be different and what we will do to get that outcome.

About Therapy Assessment and Diagnosis

At the end of the assessment process, which lasts anywhere from one to three sessions, I’ll give you a mental health diagnosis. A diagnosis is just a name for the things you are experiencing that are causing you distress.

I don’t need to provide you with a diagnosis if you don’t want one, but there are practical considerations involved in a diagnosis. If you’re going to try to use your out of network benefits from your insurance company, you need a diagnosis.

Aside from practical considerations, some people find having a name for their symptoms is very helpful. A diagnosis can point you toward others who have gone through what you’re going through.

Having a diagnosis also provides you with more information about what has worked for others who have experienced similar problems and will help guide what to expect in therapy.

Then comes the growth…

Once we know what we are dealing with, we start working on your goals. You talk about what you need to talk about, and I help you figure out what that is. You might feel unsure what exactly you need to or would want to discuss. That’s okay. We can start with that.

The heart of our work together is to identify the emotional, behavioral, and physical patterns that are keeping you stuck. We want to understand what need these patterns meet and help you find alternative ways of meeting these needs.

Sometimes, we will work directly on the thoughts and behaviors that are playing into the problems and change them in that way. At other times, we will take more of a body-based approach to examine gently what emotions are present and what you need for healing, which sometimes involves using clinical hypnosis.

Clinical hypnosis is not what you think.

It is normal to not know what to expect in therapy using clinical hypnosis. Pretty much every movie you see gets hypnosis wrong. Hypnosis is not about mind control, and I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.

Hypnosis is a way for us to use our subconscious mind’s power to create changes we want to make and encounter and process feelings in new ways.

Therapy Approaches for Trauma

Usually, we employ a combination of approaches in therapy. If PTSD is one of the main issues, or if you have a lot of distress about something that happened in the past, we will consider if Prolonged Exposure therapy or EMDR might help you put the memory of what happened to you behind you. Both EMDR and Prolonged Exposure are effective online, like the other forms of therapy I use.

Using the Wisdom of Bodily Sensations in Therapy

We will mainly pay attention to how your thoughts and feelings show up in your body and increase your ability to tolerate those feelings. Once you know on a visceral level that you don’t need to fear your emotions or pain, these sensations become less bothersome.

Many people with whom I work learn to embrace feelings as important information – as a way to tap into their internal wisdom and enhance their well-being, rather than detracting from it. They stop trying to ignore or push away their feelings and instead learn to use the experience of their bodies and minds to direct them toward choices that lead to better health and greater happiness.