What is the value of talking therapy? How does it differ from a conversation with a friend? Does it actually work? And, more to the point, ‘Would it work for me?’ If you have been asking yourself these questions, read on to find out about what talking therapy can offer.
Have you watched those movie scenes in which the therapist is depicted as a detached listener who nods and makes vague noises while the attractive lead speaks? If so, you may feel sceptical about the value of talking therapy. These days, there are many different psychological therapies available, and this may give you the impression that talking therapy is outdated.
What you may not know, is that talking therapy draws upon some of the most sophisticated social processes that take place in human interaction. Its positive effects are supported by neuroscience, that is, the study of how the brain works. Here are seven benefits of talking therapy.
In this article, the word therapist is interchangeable with counsellor and psychotherapist, who may all provide talking therapy. Find out more about the types of mental health professionals.
1. Attunement: The experience of being heard
We all know that it’s so much easier to talk when someone shows a genuine interest in what we have to say. In therapy, you will have your therapist’s full attention. This can be a healing experience in itself. In a research study, some people reported that they had never been listened to in this way before (Weger, 2014).
Attunement, the experience of having someone ‘tune in’ to us, creates a process of limbic resonance in the brain, whereby two people’s emotional states match each other. This creates the lovely feeling of being seen, heard and understood.
Parental attunement is an important factor in children’s emotional development and sense of self. If you lacked sufficient experiences of being attuned to in childhood, talking therapy can provide a reparative experience in this respect, with far-reaching positive psychological effects.
2. Mentalisation: Reflecting together
Even though your therapist is an attentive listener, talking therapy is not a one-sided affair where you do all the talking. He or she will engage with you and encourage you to reflect on the things you share. It’s like having a supportive, thinking mind alongside your own to help you articulate and make sense of your thoughts and feelings.
Your therapist might ask questions like “How did that feel?” or “How did it impact you?” Reflecting together in this way increases our capacity for mentalisation.
Mentalisation, the skill of understanding our inner experience, helps create emotional resilience. Young children lack mentalisation skills (hello, tantrums!). These skills are picked up through a joint process of reflecting together with an adult, who can adequately name the child’s ‘big feelings’ and help soothe them. In time, the child learns to understand and manage their feelings on their own.
In the past, less was known about children’s emotional needs and not all of us have had a chance to learn robust mentalisation skills. The good news is that it’s never too late!
When we become familiar with our emotional states and know how to manage them, they do not overwhelm us. Instead, we can allow our feelings to help us think about what we need. This allows us to develop self-compassion and find resources for support and self-care.
3. Enrichment for the brain
Part of talking therapy involves processing our feelings around a memory or personal story. We may explore a lived experience from different perspectives, and perhaps imagine new possibilities for ourselves.
Each thought creates new connections in the brain, known as neural pathways. Talking therapy provides plenty of opportunities for these new connections to strengthen. Over time, this process of neural integration facilitates change.
Louis Cozolino (2017, p. 22) writes: “Psychotherapy can be thought of as a specific type of enriched environment that promotes social and emotional development, neural integration, and processing complexity.” Some therapists use creative methods in their work, which further increases opportunities for enrichment.
Reflective activities such as journaling in between sessions can further deepen the reflective process, strengthen the new brain pathways and consolidate new habits and insights.
4. Validation and containment: The power of words
Words are powerful. Saying something out loud is different from thinking about it in our heads. When we say it out loud, we can hear it in a different way. Sharing our story with another person gives it shape and makes it more real: now, we both know what happened.
Having a personal experience witnessed in therapy in this way is validating and can be an important part of the process of letting go of shame or grief.
The words received in response can be equally powerful. Simple empathic statements may be: “That was really hard for you. You’ve carried this pain for a long time.” Such words of support create containment, the experience of being held through the emotional support of another, as if by an invisible structure, as we work through our experience.
Finally, naming our feelings can put them on the emotional map, metaphorically speaking. Thus, this can turn them from free-floating anxiety into something we can know and understand. As we have seen, interpreting our inner experience through mentalisation can make our feelings less scary. From there, it becomes easier to navigate – just like having a map!
5. Calming the stress response
Recall a time when you felt criticised or humiliated and how that felt in your body. Did you get a rush of heat to your face, or a sense of shrinking inwardly? Now recall a time when someone spoke kindly to you. How did that feel?
When we are criticised, the brain activates our stress response. By contrast, a kind tone of voice has a calming effect on our nervous system.
Verbal communication is directly connected to our physical experience. Human brains are designed to notice subtleties in tone of voice, in order to determine threat or safety.
When we feel seen, heard and understood (attunement, remember?), we begin to relax as the signals in our brain communicate a sense of safety to the whole organism. This settles the stress-driven fight-flight system and activates the body’s social engagement system instead. Therapy can be a safe space to talk about our emotional experience, which can ultimately help us heal.
6. Seeing the bigger picture
Imagine standing at the top of a mountain, with a full view of the landscape below. Exploring our life story in therapy can be a bit like climbing a mountain. On the way up, you can only see so far.
Sometimes, we have only diffuse recollections of certain periods or events in our lives. Perhaps at the time, we just tried to pull through. While this need not be a problem, the downside is that such events sometimes continue to affect us, by shaping our beliefs about ourselves, others, and how we relate to people and situations in general.
Talking therapy can help us see the bigger picture. We can place important events in context, and make links between past and present. Gaining insight and awareness into our life experiences is a bit like sorting images into a logical order. In therapeutic language, this is known as creating a ‘coherent narrative’. Of course, this also helps us appreciate how far we’ve come!
7. A different type of relationship
You may not always feel comfortable talking to those closest to you about what you’re going through. No matter how much they care, it’s difficult to see a loved one suffer, and it can be difficult for people to know what to say.
Therapy is different from talking to family or friends because there is no mutual exchange of personal information. This may feel strange at first. It is normal to think about your therapist’s well-being; you may worry that you’re burdening them or fear that your problems are ‘too much.’ But it can also be a great relief to know that therapy is a space just for you.
Over time, you will get to know your therapist in a different way. You may discover that the connection that you have with them is an important part of what makes therapy helpful – this is precisely what research has found (Carey et al, 2012).
In conclusion, talking therapy can have far-reaching beneficial effects on our emotional experience, brain chemistry, and overall life story.
This article was written to provide an insight into some of the benefits of talking therapy. Talking therapy may not be the best option for everyone. If you’re unsure, it can be good to talk to a few professionals, to find the type of therapy that will suit you best.
References:
Carey, T., Kelly, R., Mansell, W., and Tai, S. (2012). What’s Therapeutic About the Therapeutic Relationship? A hypothesis for practice informed by Perceptual Control Theory. The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist, 5 (2-3).
Cozolino, L. (2017). The Neuros
— Read on www.counselling-directory.org.uk/memberarticles/7-hidden-benefits-of-talking-therapy
Tag Archives: Persistence
Words Matter
Never say mean words out of anger. Your anger will pass. But your mean words can scar a person for life. So use kind words or be silent.
We have all gone through some obstacles at a certain point of our lives in the name of survival. We often tend to deny them as they are difficult to deal with. However, as difficult as they are to bear, it is imperative if we want to live a fulfilling life.
Happiness is based on embracing and accepting the negative aspects of life. Denying them turns a blind eye to reality.
#1 Worrying is useless
Worrying is created in the mind and really doesn’t offer any value to our lives. Will worrying change what’s going to happen? If not, then it’s a waste of time.
“Worrying does not accomplish anything. Even if you worry twenty times more, it will not change the situation of the world. In fact, your anxiety will only make things worse. Even though things are not as we would like, we can still be content, knowing we are trying our best and will continue to do so.
If we don’t know how to breathe, smile, and live every moment of our life deeply, we will never be able to help anyone. I am happy in the present moment. I do not ask for anything else. I do not expect any additional happiness or conditions that will bring about more happiness.
#2 If we want to be happy, we must see reality for what it is
We need to see reality for what it is. We need to be open minded and open to the truth, instead of focusing on our own unrealistic opinions. Many people choose to remain positive by avoiding negative situations, but what we need to do is to confront them.
#3 We need to accept change actively
We always have to remember that change is the only constant. The most basic example of this saying is the change from day to night and night to day on a daily basis. There is nothing that remains unchanged in the world, which is why it is only painful when we hold on to things as they are and cannot find the strength to accept change as it happens.
As we grow up, one also has to find the maturity to be secure enough to embrace change because of its unavoidable nature.
#4 The root of suffering is pursuing temporary feeling
Most people crave feelings of happiness, such as joy, euphoria, and excitement. However, these feelings are temporary and the pursuit of them turns into suffering. True happiness comes from inner peace and it is based on a feeling of being satisfied and happy with your true self. Yuval Noah Harari explains that people can stop suffering only when they understand the impermanent nature of their feelings and stop craving them.
#5 A relationship with our creator and savior is the path to reducing suffering
Reading the Bible, praying, and studying the ways of Jesus, which emphasize love and acceptance of others, compassion, honesty, and the ability to forgive. The Bible teaches us everything we need for a for filling life of love and connection to others. My faith has been a life line and source of strength in my suffering through trichotillomania, bipolar depression and mania, and anxiety.
Persistence
I will not give up. I know I can get better; not in my strength, but through God’s strength. He is my rock and my foundation. How awesome is it that the creator of the universe loves me and cares about me more than any human can imagine. He gave me life through His son Jesus.
Jesus is my best friend. We walk together and talk together. He knows me deeper than anyone else. He knows all about my past and the worst parts of me. Yet, He still loves me and wants a relationship with me. He is there for me through every trial and I am eternally grateful. Thank you God for your unending love and grace.
ACT Therapy: Acceptance
ACCEPTANCE: allowing urges, emotions, thoughts and feelings to occur without attempts to control them.
Acceptance does NOT mean a hopeless acceptance of the fact you have trichotillomania.
ACT is an acceptance-based, behaviorally oriented therapy. It was first proposed by Hayes et. al. (1999), but I believe Dr. Woods is the first to study treating ttm with ACT.
ACT Therapy � TLC Retreat Notes
Credit Sue Price notes – TLC Conference Session
TLC Retreat Session September 2002
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Douglas Woods, Ph.D.
Why work on acceptance? Dr.Woods conducted an online study which showed that pullers who are less accepting of private events tend to have stronger urges to pull and more severe pulling. [I found the concept of “private events” confusing at first. From what I can tell, it’s anything that happens inside you that you experience privately. As he said: thoughts, feelings, emotions, urges].
People follow rules not experience. He cited a study where people played a slot machine that was rigged to never pay off for the player. The people who were told that the machine WOULD pay off eventually, played longer than the people who were not told anything. The point is, people follow rules over their experience.
Where this fits in with trich: the rule is, “if you feel bad, get rid of it.” This is what society teaches us. This works well in many situations (if the kids are too noisy, send them outside; if someone is tailgating you, change lanes, etc.). But this does not work with private events such as feelings. Trying to just get rid of bad feelings, urges, etc. does not work long term. But we keep doing this anyway because that’s the rule we’ve been taught.
ACT breaks down rules by emphasizing experiential exercises over verbal rules. The idea is that the person accepts that while the rule they’ve been taught is “get rid of it”, their experience shows that this has not worked, and then they can learn a willingness to experience those private events. [Side note: the addiction book that I’ve found so helpful makes similar points: that our society teaches us that feeling bad is intolerable, to be avoided, and if you feel bad you must do something to stop feeling bad RIGHT AWAY. This is the kind of thinking that fosters addiction, and changing this way of thinking and being willing to FEEL bad is a major part of combating addiction.]
Steps to Acceptance
1. Creative Hopelessness
Focuses on getting the person to see that attempts to stop, alter or avoid private events such as thoughts, emotions or feelings have been unsuccessful. Pulling is often another way to avoid or control private events. He asked us to think about an uncomfortable private event that we’re dealing with right now. He asked how we tried to deal with it. The common answers people gave were: avoided thinking about it, distracting themselves from it, and denial. We confirmed that none of these things work long term in dealing with the private event. It comes back.
2. Willingness
Focuses on getting the participant to be willing to experience negative or uncomfortable private events. If trying to control private events is the problem, willingness to experience uncomfortable feelings may be a solution.
– Willingness is not the same as “wanting”. He had a “Joe the Bum” metaphor (acknowledging that “bum” is not PC.) Say you are having a party that all your neighbors are invited to, and everyone is having a great time. Then Joe the Bum shows up. You don’t want him there, nobody likes him, he’s dirty, he’s smelly. But if you spend your time trying to physically keep him out, you won’t be enjoying your party. But if you are WILLING to accept that he’s there and not fight it, even though you don’t WANT him there, you can still enjoy your party.
– Willingness is all or nothing
3. Diffusion
He said that even if urges etc. are not originally language-based, they become so because WE are language-based. (There was a lot of clinical stuff he went over making this point.) We need to understand language for what it is, and that words are powerful only because we let them be. This step is about de-literalizing private events. We did two exercises to illustrate this.
First he asked us what we associate with the word “milk”. We said white, cold, frothy, things like that. Then he has us say, out loud,”milkmilkmilkmilkmilkmilkmilk. . .” over and over. (Try it, it’s physically not easy to keep this up!) Picture an entire room of us saying it over and over, and he had us keep it up for what seemed like forever. When he finally stopped us, he said, “I bet you’re not thinking of that white frothy stuff anymore.”
The idea is that “milk” made us think of the white frothy stuff, but only because of what WE associate with that word. By repeating the word over and over, we de-literalized it. It became just a word, the letters m-i-l-k. Similarly, an urge that’s felt as “I need to pull” can be de-literalized by repeating “I need to pull I need to pull I need to pull” until they are just words, not something that must be acted on. Those words don’t have power unless we give it to them.
The second exercise is to imagine you are watching a parade and a band is marching by. Imagine that your thoughts, whatever’s bothering you, are written up on cards that the band members are carrying. And just watch those “thoughts on cards” go past you. Acknowledge them but separate yourself from them.
4. Understanding the Self
Who are “you?” Who is your “self?”
– Conceptualized Self: who do we say we are? What do we stand for? How do we see ourselves? (we typically think of this as our only self, and defend it)
– Knowing Self: the “self” that is experiencing events as they are occurring
– Observing Self: the “self” that has always been and always will be. He made an analogy to a chessboard: I am the board, not the game that is happening on it. Whatever happens on the board does not have to affect me.
5. Valuing
– You have the ability to choose your behavior. You must choose to move in your valued direction.
– What do you value? What do you want your life to stand for?
– Need to make psychological room for private events while you move your life in the valued direction.
[I think an example of what he means by the last item is: a valued direction for me, is not pulling. By trying to move my life in that valued direction, I will have uncomfortable private events and I need to accept this and be ready for this.
He also said:
-Committed Action Invites Obstacles (disguised as private events)
– The Journey in the Valued Direction involves fear and action. So I take it as, anything I do to move my life in a direction I value(trich-related or not) can bring up private events that will be uncomfortable. He is saying “choose to move in your valued direction” while experiencing these private events.]
**The idea is to combine acceptance techniques with other behavior therapy procedures. A clinical study showed this is effective, based on five different measures of pretreatment and post treatment hair pulling.
For more info, this book is very helpful:
A Purpose for Your Pain
I no longer wish I never had trich or bipolar disorder. Although both come full of pain and suffering, there is another side. Working through my struggles has made me the person I am today. I don’t know if I would have the same faith, spirit of perseverance, or compassion. I think my best traits have been developed through my pain. God did not cause my suffering, but He will use it for good.
I still hope to be pull free, but I am happy now as I am. My moods are relatively stable and I have settled on a set of meds that works for me. I still pull, but it does not rule my life. Yes, I do spend a considerable amount of time practicing awareness and coping strategies. However, I do not feel like less of a person because I do this or because I am missing some hair.
Everyone has some form of struggle in their life. Learning to use that suffering for good is the key to moving through it and finding a purpose for your pain.
Your Pain Often Reveals God’s Purpose for You
BY RICK WARREN — NOVEMBER 25, 2014
Your pain often reveals God’s purpose for you. God never wastes a hurt! If you’ve gone through a hurt, he wants you to help other people going through that same hurt. He wants you to share it. God can use the problems in your life to give you a ministry to others. In fact, the very thing you’re most ashamed of in your life and resent the most could become your greatest ministry in helping other people.
Who can better help somebody going through a bankruptcy than somebody who went through a bankruptcy? Who can better help somebody struggling with an addiction than somebody who’s struggled with an addiction? Who can better help parents of a special needs child than parents who raised a special needs child? Who can better help somebody who’s lost a child than somebody who lost a child?
The very thing you hate the most in your life is what God wants to use for good in your life.
The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 1, verses 4 and 6, “God comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When we are weighed down with troubles, it is for your comfort and salvation! For when we ourselves are comforted, we will certainly comfort you. Then you can patiently endure the same things” (NLT).
This is called redemptive suffering. Redemptive suffering is when you go through a problem or a pain for the benefit of others.
This is what Jesus did. When Jesus died on the cross, he didn’t deserve to die. He went through that pain for your benefit so that you can be saved and go to Heaven.
There are many different causes for the problems, pains, and suffering in your life. Sometimes the stuff that happens you bring on yourself. When you make stupid decisions, then it causes pain in your life. If you go out and overspend and buy things you can’t afford and presume on the future, and then you go deeply in debt and lose your house, you can’t say, “God, why did you let me lose my house?” You can’t blame God for your bad choices.
But in some of your problems, you’re innocent. You’ve been hurt by the pain, stupidity, and sins of other people. And some of the pain in your life is for redemptive suffering. God often allows us to go through a problem so that we can then help others.
Persistence not Perfection
Let’s strengthen those weak muscles!
Just persist until you are successful!
My solace tonight as I persist in my journey to recovery from trich comes from comments of some of the people on the Fairlight Bulletin Board posted on Amanda’s Trichotillomania Guide.
Definition of Success
I just wanted to add another observation to all that has been said about making a commitment to not pulling. Think of it as exercise. When I started walking a couple of months ago, I thought a mile was forever. Now that I’ve been walking regularly, my stamina has increased, and a mile goes by quickly. I can’t run a marathon (yet!), but I am stronger. In the same way, as we practice not pulling, we’re building “muscles” that make it easier not to pull. The first couple of weeks are horrible, but then it gets easier–if you persist. I’ve slipped a couple of times…
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