Setting Goals For Your Therapy or How To Get To "Better."

In earlier blogs, I've offered ideas about how to choose a therapist and what you might expect in your first session. Later, I'll offer thoughts on how therapy comes to an end. What's left? The in-between: the work.

If you're like alot of people, you're likely to come to therapy in fair amount of distress. Some distress shows up emotionally: anger, fear, sadness, frustration, shame, doubt, anxiety, confusion, just to name a few. Other times, distress is accompanied by physical symptoms: insomnia, weight loss, weight gain, loss of appetite, stomach pains, as well as assorted body aches.  Distress can also show up as a challenge for relationships: rocky romantic relationships; difficulty with bosses, employees or  coworkers; rifts with family or friends. Distress can even come from isolation from relationships, which causes distance, and can gradually erode your contact with the world outside your space.

No matter how your distress manifests itself, most people come to therapy with a common goal: to feel better.

It's likely that, early on, your therapist will help you to develop your goals for therapy. It gives your therapist a specific direction for your work together and helps you both have a clearer understanding of how therapy is progressing. Setting goals can help you answer the question: how will I know when I'm getting better?

Goal-setting can be a challenge. Understandably, my clients often walk into their first session in a great deal of emotional pain. They may not be able to name "goals" for therapy. As soon as it feels productive I like to introduce the idea of goal-setting with the question: At the end of our work together, how would you like things to be different?

Together, we take a look at every goal you might have. Then, over the course of a session or two, we begin to prioritize goals. Which one or two are the most important for us to start with?  Which goals are truly achievable in the therapy office? Are your goals about changing yourself from within, or are they focused on changing others in your life? If you're out to change people who are not even in the room, who may not even feel there is a problem--may not want therapy or any changes in their lives--chances are the results of your therapy will be disappointing, if not fruitless.

Your therapy is about you. Your distress, your symptoms, and how you cope.  The only productive goals are ones that focus on the changes you wish to see in yourself.

Goals should be realistic, observable and, as much as possible, measurable.  For example: if you're feeling depressed and are isolating yourself from friends and family, one goal might be to eventually reconnect with the very people who might provide you support.  One way to measure this goal would be to log the number of outside contacts you make with these people each week, with increased contact as the goal over time. Weekly discussions with your therapist might include examination of what worked and what was in the way each week of the contact you want to have.

As I've stressed in previous blogs, everyone is unique. You'll work at your own pace; no two clients experience the same velocity or depth of progress.  While there are, alas, no guarantees, many clients, over time, report feeling better. Goals can help you and your therapist focus on where you want to go in your journey together. Along the way, you and your therapist will hopefully discover what works for you and, together, you will start seeing the results: feeling better.

Better is better. I wish this for you in your therapeutic journey.

Thanks for listening.