Do psychotherapists help?

Friends and clients sometimes ask me whether psychotherapy even works. Do psychotherapists actually help? Or is it all just created to make money through conversations with gullible people?

If you say that psychotherapists definitely help everyone, it would not be correct. Large false expectations play a cruel joke. The higher you fly, the more painful it is to fall.

If such expectations exist at the beginning of therapy, then disappointment from the lack of quick results leads to the client’s despair.

In general, this is a habitual model of behavior - to be enchanted in order to devalue and be disappointed.

For the sake of objectivity, it must be said that psychotherapists help, but not everyone and not always.

The question is, are you ready to make efforts to be cured or do you hope that it will be done without your efforts with the help of magical manipulations and procedures?

If you are counting on a magic pill, then psychotherapy will not work for you.

You definitely won’t be able to hide from yourself behind an all-powerful and all-knowing psychotherapist and you will have to experience your feelings and conflicts with him. He is simply a guide to the world of working on oneself and realizing what our unconscious hides.

The task of psychotherapists is to help see the forces, feelings and desires behind behavior and conflicts in order to gain control over them through awareness.

But this control is exercised only by the client himself. The therapist cannot change the client bypassing his will (by stuffing bitter medicine into the role like a child).

Therefore, the success of therapy largely depends on whether the client is ready to trust, open up and change. But this is not so simple - it requires a certain courage and determination - to face the fears and traumas of childhood, to sort out closets filled with the skeletons of unlived feelings. Only by experiencing and realizing processes hidden from understanding do we gain power over them.

Psychotherapists accompany the client in the sea of his experiences, supporting him without letting him “drown.”  But at the same time, they do not “save” the client with advice so that he learns to swim on his own.

It may look cruel, but the goal is not just not to give a ready-made solution to the “fish”, but to teach it to catch it on its own using a “fishing rod”, that is, self-help techniques.  In this way, the therapist cultivates the responsible adult part of the client.

Much depends on whether the psychotherapeutic relationship will develop and whether there will be enough motivation to overcome difficulties. 

If yes, then the results will not keep you waiting. Internal changes will gradually begin to occur, which are quite difficult to recognize and accept.

Of course, a lot also depends on psychotherapists and their qualifications and experience. The psychotherapist is mainly responsible for the quality of work and compliance with the framework, but not for the result.

How long the therapy should be for those long-awaited results to come is a complex question.

In my method of short-term therapy, a request usually takes up to 10 meetings.  It rarely happens that three to five meetings are enough for a client to solve his situation, but this is more typical of psychological counseling. For long-term sustainable results, you need to go a certain way. Some people can go through it quickly, others slowly. Everyone has their own pace.

Of course, if you work on yourself, you will get results. That's why psychotherapists work. But the result in a particular case also depends on the client.

Therefore, if you are guaranteed results at the first meeting, you need to be suspicious of this.

Most likely this is a sign of either a lack of professionalism or experience.

I will be glad to help you in your work on yourself online or in person in Kyiv. To schedule a consultation, click on the button below.

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