People often wonder what the purpose of psychotherapy is. Maybe get rid of the symptoms? Ease suffering? Make life easier? Change personality? Bring a person back to normal?

The therapist's goals may differ depending on the approach he uses.

So even in the same school, psychotherapeutic counseling and psychotherapy can pursue different goals. Psychological counseling is aimed at increasing psychological competence, and psychotherapy is aimed at the development and awareness of the individual.

The difference between different schools or areas of psychotherapy is how the goal is achieved, through the implementation of what tasks.

Let's look at all the possible goals of psychotherapy

• Get relief from symptoms

This goal blocks the experience, and since the symptom itself arises from the blocking of the experience, such a goal dooms psychotherapy to failure.  The more we fight a symptom, the paradoxically we increase its presence.

Clients come after an ethereal independent struggle with symptoms.

Therefore, a more correct approach would be to expand the field of interest to the area in which this symptom occurs.  Explore experiences that include the symptom.

Thus, getting rid of the symptom is still a secondary, although important, goal of psychotherapy.

• Ease suffering

People often seek psychotherapy after many years of psychological suffering and perceive psychotherapy as an “ambulance” when they themselves can no longer endure it.

Such short-term help, unfortunately, is not possible; it is impossible to stop long-term processes in one session. A person hid his pain from his experiences, but in order to get rid of it, it is necessary to open a dark closet and take out old skeletons.

This is especially important when experiencing trauma. There are EMDR techniques that I use that allow you to work through traumatic experiences without even naming them, but in general psychotherapy requires painful frankness.  Therefore, often in psychotherapy a person is in more pain than before. Opening an abscess requires some surgical intervention, which is associated with pain, but it gives hope that the healed wound will no longer cause pain in the future.

Through pain, a person gains life in all its fullness, without repressing and accepting its various sides that were repressed from living.

Therefore, getting rid of suffering is also a side goal of psychotherapy, its result. 

• Making your life easier

Does life really become easier after therapy? Becoming more comfortable?  Often after therapy, a seemingly simple life becomes very complicated and acquires many hitherto invisible facets.  Now these facets and aspects must be taken into account, which makes it impossible to maintain the simplicity of the old life. The environment usually treats new unusual reactions poorly, more conflicts appear and this continues until the new behavior is mastered at the end of therapy.

For this reason, at the beginning of therapy, it is advisable not to make any radical decisions or do drastic actions.

• Overcoming the crisis

Statistics say that 80% cope with crisis situations on their own without the help of a specialist. Rather, the psychotherapist's help is that he accompanies the client in the process of overcoming the crisis. And often psychotherapy itself is a catalyst for a crisis, because it opens up new layers of life. We can say that the crisis is a tool through which psychotherapy occurs, and not a way out of it.

• Social adaptation

Personality transformation forces you to reconsider your life and the values on which a person relied. But often social status and achievements are products of neuroses. Many successful people stop psychotherapy at the very beginning, vaguely understanding the threat that threatens their neurotic achievements.

Many extraordinary achievements and brilliant works of art would never have arisen in healthy people. 

Does psychotherapy improve relationships with loved ones? Not always. In half of the cases, successful psychotherapy leads to divorce. And as I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of therapy, the relationship is likely to deteriorate, since new behavior patterns have not yet been mastered, and the person has already abandoned the old ones. A person's bad, but consistently bad life is subject to shocks. Hidden conflicts come to light. Those around them are trying to pull a person into the usual rut of relationships that are comfortable for them and familiar to them.

Of course, as a result of psychotherapy, relationships improve and become simpler, but this, like getting rid of symptoms, is more of a side effect of psychotherapy, rather than its goal. Therefore, we can say that higher awareness does not always make social life easier.

• Personal growth

Everyone wants to change and become better. It’s just not clear how to measure these changes. Personal growth is a growing trend in modern society. Therefore, psychotherapy is also considered as one of the tools for this growth, along with yoga, spiritual practices, religion and many other different approaches.

This leads to the fact that a person, without even understanding himself, runs away into some other behavior patterns that are alien to him.

In fact, a person changes not when he runs away from himself, but paradoxically, when he returns to himself and becomes himself. It is the relinquishment of control and acceptance of reality and oneself that lead to changes in psychotherapy.

The usefulness of these changes is highly subjective. Perhaps they will please the client and loved ones, or maybe only the therapist.

• Calm

Life becomes more eventful, which means more hectic, vibrant and varied. Of course, there is calm in such a life, but it is also a by-product and not the goal of therapy.

• Psychological norm

The psychological norm itself is a product of social consent. In this sense, normality of a person is understood as convenience for the behavior patterns around him.

If a person himself is worried about his behavior, then, of course, psychotherapy is aimed at bringing his behavior closer to the “norm” acceptable to the person himself and society. But it differs from medicine, the goal of which is to return a person to physical normality. A psychotherapist works with a person, not with pathology, not with a disease, but with how it affects a person’s contact with himself and others.  Psychotherapy focuses primarily on the individual rather than society and its expectations.

Therefore, rather, a person returns to his unique path from the imposed norm of society. Socialization is a consequence of a person’s ability to negotiate, adapting his perceived uniqueness to the uniqueness of others.

Thus, movement towards oneself, one’s uniqueness, awareness is the goal of psychotherapy, and all of the above goals are achieved as side goals during the sometimes difficult and painful path to living a fuller and richer life, accepting oneself.

If you are ready to embark on this exciting path to yourself, I will be glad to accompany you online or in person in Kyiv. You can sign up by clicking the button below.

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