Figuring Out Therapy Goals
Good Therapy Will Go Deeper
I was walking through Mesa Community College (over around Dobson Rd. and Southern Ave.), and I saw this sign: “Manage your time. Stay on track.” I was surprised that it gave me mixed feelings. However, I think it brought up that internal struggle between staying focused, always needing to be productive, making sure to do something importance with my time, and then that internal desire to relax, to not feel shame for how I choose to spend my time.
I find that when a lot of people enter into therapy, they are more experiencing a struggle like this. This is especially true for those of us who have a tendency to overwork, help everyone else first, be a perfectionist or a people-pleaser, and find it difficult to relax. We may even come into therapy with thinking the goal is to figure out how to manage our time better, and to have someone else help us stay on track on our lives.
That mindset isn’t necessarily wrong, but there is some nuance to it. You might come into therapy believing that there is only one way to achieve what you want, but I find that often the therapist is helping you search and become aware of the deeper goals that you have, and then they help you reach those deeper goals instead.
For example, take a busy mom, working full-time, managing the household, and caring for her kids’ needs. She might come in wanting to feel less stressed, feeling like she wastes too much time watching TV, saying that she is unmotivated and tired all of the time. A therapist might suggest some time management tips or point her in the direction of some parenting strategies, but generally, that isn’t where therapy ends.
When we zoom out, we can see that there are bigger goals to achieve, and we might make more progress in the way that we feel if we shift to focus on those instead. For this example, it might look like:
Seeing that she avoids asking for help or depending on anyone because she has been let down by others before, she has been made to feel like she wasn’t allowed to need help, and she learned that she has to do everything herself.
Realizing that she sets unrealistic expectations on her household and parenting because she doesn’t want to feel like a failure, and she learned that mistakes aren’t allowed.
Discovering that she overworks because work is where she feels a sense of pride since accomplishments are more easily seen, and it gives her a sense of control because these are problems she can fix, compared to her home life that can feel out of control.
So, you can see how the road to actually realizing these deeper problems could take a while? And even if you are told about them, it might take a while to actually be ready to address them? This is why finding a therapist who is competent, yet helps you feel safe exploring and healing those deeper problems is vital. If these problems were easy to fix, you would find it on Google, and it wouldn’t take a master’s degree to do this job. Therapy is so much more than being given advice or information, it is an interpersonal process.
