Many people wonder if they should consider Psychotherapy. See what response you give to the issues and situations below.

1. You sense that life could be more satisfying than it is. You want to feel better about yourself, less stressed, more easily able to use your potential to reach the goals you set for yourself

2. You want to feel more effective and comfortable in your relationships, to change non-productive patterns with your partner or your children, parents, co-workers, or friends. You want to be better at communicating and resolving conflicts.

3. Life's stresses are getting you down. You find yourself anxious or depressed, having difficulties at work or school, having trouble concentrating or sleeping, fighting with your family, not taking care of yourself physically, or generally under the weather.

These are some of the life experiences that lead people to seek psychotherapy. Perhaps some are familiar to you, or perhaps you wondered for other reasons whether you might benefit from psychotherapy. We live in a world that is increasingly complex, intense, and stressful. Most people, at some time or other in their lives, can make good use of psychotherapy as they map their course and steer their way through it. People can profit from psychotherapy-can learn, grow, and change-at any stage or age in life. It is never too soon and never too late.

Psychotherapy is a complex process that must vary with each client. It is not a set of simple "technologies" or procedures. Doing it well requires a high degree of education and training and a well-developed capacity for empathic listening. All psychotherapy, furthermore, depends on the development of a safe, trusting, confidential relationship between the client and the therapist. Most methods of psychotherapy aim at helping clients change unproductive ways of thinking and behaving,

What is psychotherapy? What does it offer?

Psychotherapy is a process of discovery-a learning process. In it, we can work together to discover what events, situations, and relationships in your current life or earlier life are leaving you with uncomfortable feelings or ways of dealing with your world that are not working as well as you want. You work toward acquiring new, effective, helpful ways of understanding your experiences and the events in your life, your responses to them, and the actions you take. Thus your actions can become less automatic and more fully based on understanding and choice. Your partner, your child or your entire family might participate in the processes of discovery, learning, and change that are characteristic of psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy is an unfolding process. It begins by creating the private, confidential context in which it can do its job. The work that is actually done depends on the your needs and desires. In some cases the work is to uncover emotional experiences of the past that are brought to the surface by current events, situations, and relationships, so that the present circumstances can be understood and dealt with in a different way. In the course of this exploring and re-understanding, painful or uncomfortable symptoms such as persistent depressed feelings, fearfulness, or unwanted habits and thoughts often decrease in intensity and frequency, Ways of responding and acting which have been ineffective can also be changed.

Psychotherapy looks at the whole human being and at the many complex factors that have contributed to making every person unique. Symptoms such as anxiety or depression, are viewed not just as a problem, but also as a sign that something is hurting inside-that some aspect of the person needs attention.

Psychotherapy assumes that there are parts of our lives of which we are not fully aware. Our feelings, our day and night dreams, our thoughts, and our subtle reactions to people and events are often based partially on hidden assumptions and on memories of earlier events. In these shadows of our daily lives reside many of our old wounds as well as much of our untapped creative energy. Psychotherapy affords an opportunity to uncover, explore, learn about, and appreciate our perceptions, our hidden assumptions, the ways we have adapted to life-and how all these have evolved.

Psychotherapy takes place in the context of a solid, trustworthy working relationship between the client and the therapist. It helps create the context, the insight, and under- standing, the vision, and the support within which durable growth and desirable change can take place. Psychotherapy is not advice-giving. It empowers the client to come to useful personal understanding, to make clearer choices. and to achieve durable independence.

As we become more aware and more appreciative of what is inside us, we can resolve or come to terms both with our internal conflicts and our reactions to people and external events; we feel in better possession of ourselves and more able to make positive and life-affirming decisions. Creative energies no longer need to be spent on keeping old troubles in control, and there is more energy for love, work and play, We can see past and present events and people more clearly, and come to know more about who we are-independent of other people's definitions. Some have referred to the psychotherapy experience as the awakening of aspects of the inner sell which have been hidden.

Thus in the process of psychotherapy can see beneath the surface and integrate intellectual understanding with your emotional experiences. The confidential psychotherapy sessions encourage your thoughts and emotional experiences to flow freely. In this free-flowing process, a variety of thoughts and feelings emerge; they create a window through which you can understand your inner processes more directly. You jointly examine these moment-to-moment experiences in a non-judgmental manner that provides new under- standing about your experience of the world. The process gradually becomes a part of your internal experience and goes with you after the therapy is completed.

(parts of the above were taken from the 1997, American Mental Health Alliance "Creating a Different Future)