Therapists Never Explain HOW Therapy Works. What Everyone Should Know...

I believe therapy would be a lot more effective if therapists started their therapy sessions explaining what I'm going to explain here. I have to admit I have spent time with several different therapists, and none of them explained to me why therapy works, and what the process is. They all just jump right in and ask us to spill our souls to them so they can probe for the hidden cause of these actions or feelings. Never once has a therapist explained to me what I need to do in order to make therapy worth the money spent. (Please note, I am not a licensed professional and what I'm sharing is my perspective based on my personal experiences.) I think every therapist should explain the following during the first session or even during the consultation.

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Real Objective of Therapy The objective of therapy is typically very similar for everyone. There is a psychological problem that needs addressing. What does that mean though? That means that our thought process is not functioning in a way that is helping us feel good nor succeed in specific or all areas of our life. Therefore, the objective of therapy is for us to evaluate our current thought process. After evaluation, we need to reprogram it so it no longer provides us emotional discomfort, which in turn is damaging our progression forward in life. Process to Reach the Objective In order to reprogram your mind, it is first necessary to understand what thoughts we are having that are creating the negative emotions and events. This is why the therapist has you tell them the whole story of everything that happened. They are looking to extract out of the story the parts in which your thought process is hurting you. For your comfort, they also validate your experience. So when they ask you questions such as 'how does that make you feel?" What they are really asking is "what thoughts are you having that don't serve your best interest?" A therapist usually likes to try to figure out where the thought originated, which is why they typically dig further back into your past then the triggering event. They do this so they can understand what the original thought was that caused you to start believing something negative about life or yourself. It really isn't important what the past event was, it is more important what you have told yourself about the event, and whether you are still telling yourself the same thing today. So therapists ask an array of probing questions that help them figure out how deeply seated is this negative thought, and whether there are other negative thoughts that were formed because of the first one. When they are able to find that initial thought, they can then follow the trail of thoughts you created. Thus, they can then follow your thought process. With this information they now know what thoughts need to be changed and how much effort it will take to reprogram them to something more positive. Necessary Information to Understand Why they focus on childhood? Between the ages of 2 and 9, we create the foundation of all of our thoughts. We create our belief system. The belief system tells us how the world works, how to process emotions, what our values are, and who we are as a person… such as understanding our strengths/weaknesses, determining if we good/bad, smart/stupid, pretty/ugly, serious/goofy, etc. This belief system gets essentially set in stone during that time period. It takes a significant amount of effort to change our beliefs as we age. Think of this belief system as being the foundation of a house. Everything we do and think in our lives after that age is built on top of that foundation. The foundation of a house is very hard to change. Therefore, if you are having negative thoughts or feelings about something in your life today, it is quite likely that you have a belief you created during that time period that is now causing that feeling or thought. This is why therapists always ask about childhood traumas and events. How the brain creates a belief? A new belief is formed when we receive new information after we experienced something that created a strong emotion. This means, that something must happen first then we react to it. Our reaction is the brain comprehending the event and our body telling us how we feel about it. That process creates a belief. We learned that when Event A happens, then Event B happens and it makes us feel a certain way. Here are a couple examples of some newly formed beliefs.

1. Joe touches a stove for the first time and he gets burned and it hurt. The new belief is "The stove can be dangerous." Prior to this happening Joe didn't know he could get hurt by the stove.

2. Sally's friend stole her favorite doll which made Sally angry. Sally forms a belief that the person who stole it isn't a good person. Before that, they thought the person was nice and was a good friend.

3. George's mother died. George experiences grief. George learns that love hurts. Before the death George had never experienced a negative feeling in relation to love.

Our beliefs form our value system. Joe values his safety more after his event. Sally values integrity more after her event. George values life more after his event. The more beliefs we form around specific categories the more clear our value system becomes. The reason it isn't easy to change a belief is because we placed that belief into our value system. The higher the value of the belief is, the harder the belief will be to change.

The only way to change a belief is by experiencing a highly emotional event, or through repetition of countering information i.e. drilling it into our heads. Joe will need to have a large number of safe painless interactions with the stove to change his belief that "the stove is dangerous" to be instead "the stove is sometimes dangerous but mostly safe." Sally needs to rebuild the broken trust by experiencing many positive countering interactions with the thief if she wanted to change her opinion of her friend. When George falls in love for the first time, his belief that love hurts will start to diminish from this new emotional event. How habits play a part As I mentioned before, we build our life off our belief system. We do this by subconsciously creating habits that support our beliefs. Most of the time, we don't even realize that our habits are linked to our beliefs. That's because we don't realize that most of the thoughts we have validate the things that we believe. For example, say we created a belief that dogs are dirty and annoying. Anytime we are around dogs, we will instinctively avoid letting them jump up on us. We may not pay them much attention as they are not of value to us. We might get into a bad mood when they are around, because we have created a habit of thinking negative things about them. That belief that dogs are dirty and annoying will come to mind subconsciously every time we see a dog and we will continue to create new habits supporting that belief. As another example, let's say you formed a belief that you're not good at math. You will instinctively avoid anything related to math in your life. Without realizing it, you will avoid solving math problems in your head and thus always keep a calculator app on your phone. You may end up avoiding certain professions that involved doing math, like a cashier, or banker, or accountant. You see how you changed the course of your life based on the belief that math is hard. Everything we do, we do out of habits that are based on something we believe. The more those beliefs align with our values, the more habits we build. How feelings and thoughts are linked It's important to understand how feelings and thoughts are connected. Feelings create thoughts. Thoughts create feelings. Emotions are designed to provide us information about certain things. These things include whether we are safe, what we like or don't like, and whether something is aligning with our values or not. Our feelings can evoke certain thoughts in us. For example, if I woke up feeling sad for seemingly no reason, my negative emotion is going to create negative thoughts. I may start thinking that the day is going to be boring or bad, or I might think negative thoughts about myself for feeling that emotion. The same thing can happen with thoughts too. If I start remembering a really negative experience, I'm going to start feeling negative emotions. I may start to feel anxiety or anger. This is important to know for two reasons. First, it reminds us how easy it is to get into a negative thought/feeling cycle as they build off of each other. However, equally important is how it reminds us that we are in control of both our emotions and our thoughts. If we feel something negative, we know that if we think about something positive we will then start to feel positive emotions instead. Why it's so hard to change So to recap briefly, if we have subconscious negative beliefs, we will create negative habits, which will then create negative emotions and negative thoughts. The negative emotions and negative thoughts get stuck in a loop reinforcing each other with more negative emotions and thoughts. Every day we are having thoughts and feelings, and making decisions based on them. We almost never re-evaluate the subconscious belief that is driving those thoughts and feelings because we don't remember we even believe it. These beliefs are hidden from us. They are so deeply embedded into our daily routines and thought process. We rarely are even aware of the belief, even when we are experiencing the repercussions of them. It is hard for us on our own to realize that the reason we are feeling a certain way is because of a seemingly unrelated event from years ago, that created a belief which we never let go of because we forgot we even believed it. What Needs to Be Done The goal of therapy is not to relive all the horrible things that have ever happened to you in your life. You can skip a lot of the pain of therapy by trying to look the tasks that needs to be done objectively. It is simply tracing the thought process. People fail in therapy because therapists force them to rehash old painful wounds, and don’t tell them why they have to relive all this pain again. Your brain doesn't know the difference between real and imagined. It doesn't know the difference between past, present and future. It thinks every thought you have is happening now because those thoughts are creating respective emotions based on the thoughts.

People get overwhelmed going down memory lane and end up quitting therapy because they end up feeling worse than when they started therapy. I believe if they knew the objective they would be able to approach the situation with a different mindset which would be more productive. They would understand how they can help the therapist trace the thought process. Once it is traced, the reprogramming can begin with repetition of new information that negatives the unhelpful beliefs we have.