What is Individual Therapy?

Firstly, what isn’t therapy?  Therapy isn’t advice giving.  It’s not opinion-giving.  It’s not fortune telling, nor is it gossip or chatting.

Therapy is a clinical language that helps you to help yourself by giving you skills, tools, or experiences to engage life’s challenges and difficulties.

There are broadly 3 clinical languages that most therapists can agree on, Venting, Coping, and Processing.  Though each therapist will speak all 3 of them, one tends to be their first language that they lead with.  Each approach has a strength that makes them desirable and a drawback that makes them unhelpful in the wrong circumstances.  At Become The Way Psychotherapy, we have clinicians who are specialists in each of these 3 languages.  They are most easily understood as followings:

• Coping skills help you to change the problem you’re dealing with directly or indirectly.
• Processing helps you to change yourself so you’re strong enough to deal with the problem.
• Venting helps you to change the distance between you and the problem to get perspective.

Coping Style therapies:

Coping therapists focus on providing tools to help you to navigate problems in the here and now.  Retracing patterns or figuring out where things came from may be too arduous, take too much time, or are too impractical to work on or may have been worked on already.  If the issue is that you’re in a briarpatch of difficult circumstances getting scraped by your emotions and the feelings that the actions of others provoke, coping skills are a way to pivot in each moment toward a mindful goal that you have.  They often leverage mindfulness and concrete skills to practice to help you author your experience right away, often working in the very session that you learn them in – no delays.  Coping can become maladaptive if they’re used to try to deal with a permanent problem rather than a constantly changing one as they can become crutches rather than tools for healing.  Therapies like DBT, Solution Focused Therapy, Somatic Therapies like EFT, and Tools-work (Stutz), can give you a robust toolbox that starts working session 1. 

The Following Therapists on our team have specialties in these techniques:

Katie Drummond

Hannah Braun

Jill Childs

Malerie Staskiewicz

Jillian Mittiga

Peter Mittiga

Processing-based therapies:

Processing-based therapies work by challenging you to change yourself.  They often do this by using values work, asking you to reach for an aspirational version of yourself, or exposing you to stressors to grow your resilience to them.  These types of therapy can take longer to work but generally aim to help people change the paradigm with which they see their lives.  This has a lot of downstream benefits.  Many of these therapies are built on the principles of Zen or Stoicism, and they generally help people by making them strong enough to meet their circumstances and focus on helping people to grow within rather than manage the external world.  Processing-based therapies like REBT, CBT, Logotherapy, and ACT are wonderful for achieving these kinds of goals.  However, they can become maladaptive when someone is unwilling to change themselves, or changing themselves is too scary to approach, which can prompt a lot of wasted time and opportunity when the client could be developing in other ways.

The Following Therapists on our team have specialties in these techniques:

Carl Chinn

Emily Jaskier

Antanien Slomba

Viktor Cortese

Lucon Rigaud

Venting style therapies:

Venting therapies tend to help you discover yourself and to uncover what you don’t know is there.  Often this helps people who are going through something very private such as grief, an affair, or trauma that they can’t share with the people around them and that closed-offness of trying to figure it out alone can be stifling and leave you feeling dejected or alone.  Venting style therapists often use clinical languages like EMDR, Schema Therapy, IFS, or Person Centered therapy to help you to discover what’s going on beneath the surface with the help of a guide who knows what patterns to look for, skills to teach you to look for yourself, or experiences to provoke to help you uncover your own secrets.  Venting becomes unproductive when you’re not discovering yourself and you’re instead offloading the weekly stress that you accumulate.  Therapeutic venting is about releasing vulnerability by digging in deep with a professional.  If one gets stuck venting the same thing over and over again, the experience can become maladaptive. 

The following therapists on our team have specialties in these techniques:

Raelyn Legg

Valerie Joyal

Stephanie Kane

Jamie DeGeorge

Mary Kay Rose

Lee Trometer

What to expect from making an appointment:

Therapy tends to follow a couple of phases that are recognizable throughout the clinical process.  

1. Pre-Intake: You sign your intake documents explaining the commitment to treatment and expectations for confidentiality, amongst other things
   
   
2. The Intake Phase: This can range between 1-3 sessions, where you come to know your therapist and create a treatment plan together that’s going to address what you want out of therapy.  You’ll identify the problem as well as what your goals for treatment are.  Sometimes, the therapist may also refer you to another specialist at this phase if they believe you could be better served by someone else.
   
   
3. The Onboarding Phase: Several sessions are used to show you the basics of the therapeutic language that the therapist uses and they generally encourage you to give some early attempts at speaking it yourself.
   
   
4. The Treatment Phase: You start to have an idea of what your therapist is going to say when you bring them a problem and are working out how to integrate that into your experience with them as a guide.
   
   
5. The Break-Out Phase: You start to proactively use what you’ve learned throughout therapy to give yourself your own homework, map out your own goals, and in some ways become your own therapist.  As goals begin to be achieved, sometimes new goals can arise as your abilities now allow you to reach for more challenging goals that you’re unfamiliar with.
   
   
6.  Discharge: You and your therapist acknowledge the progress that you’ve made and believe that you’ve achieved the goals that you initially set out to undertake.  Ideally, you review your treatment with your therapist and review a list of what you’ve learned to carry forward into the future.
   
   
7. Post-Discharge: Though the evidence-based therapies that our therapists practice are designed to work, sometimes life gets in the way and sends you a curveball later on down the road.  Your therapist may give you instructions for how to return if necessary or give you a referral to a specialist who speaks a different language if what is left over could be more efficiently addressed by someone specifically trained in that area.

The timeline for completing therapy is more of an art form than a science.  Some therapies only require a couple of months of weekly meetings, while some can take a couple of years.  If you are more than a few sessions in and don’t know where therapy is going or what the goal is, speak to your therapist to make sure that it’s the right fit and that the therapeutic language itself is focused on what’s important to you.  Though therapy can take a couple of years, if you’re at that point, there will be milestones and progress markers indicating that it’s working.  If there aren’t, it may be the wrong therapeutic language to help you with your current challenges. You don’t have to do it alone. Begin your healing journey today with a therapist who truly understands and supports you.