Therapy Process
“Therapy is to heal not a quick fix”
What is Psychotherapy?
I believe that my clients are the experts of their own life stories and they have the potential to make real changes in their lives. As a therapist, I am here to facilitate the process with you. I often tell my clients, “Therapy is to process something you haven’t been able to process in the past”. Our unprocessed experiences and emotions from the past impact our daily lives more than we consciously realize. They are like the roots of a weed. You can cut it off at the stem, but it will quickly grow back unless you get to its roots. This means that we go back to understand what are the underlying causes of our behaviours. One at a time works!
What Can You do to get the most from therapy sessions?
In order to get the most from your session, a good way to prepare yourself is simply to come with an intention to be open, honest and willing. I will do my best to make you feel at ease and help you share what the presenting problems are that you want to work on. The greatest predictor of success in therapy is the connection between Therapist and Client.
What Can You Expect of Psychotherapy Process with Me?
I will provide a safe environment for you, and walk alongside you in your journey of healing and growth. We will work collaboratively to explore your unique goals and ways you can move towards them. I will be actively listening to you with openness and empathy, and inviting you to explore patterns of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours while you are discovering your insight, courage, and uniqueness and the beauty of your true self. On our journey, I will respect how fast or slow you want to go and how much or little you want to share with me.
How Long would Psychotherapy Take?
The number of sessions you need depends on your goals, the severity, complexity, history of the issues, as well as your motivation, capacity, and commitment. Individuals with specific concerns may meet their goals in a short term (6~10 sessions). Those who are exploring other issues of a more longstanding or complex nature may need more sessions; medium-term (upto 20 sessions) or open-ended counselling. In the Initial Assessment Session, we will tentatively agree on how many sessions you would like to have and then regularly discuss and review your progress. Reviewing helps us to see where we are in the process to see if your therapeutic goals have changed or developed as a result of our work together. However, the decision about whether to continue or to end the counselling will be yours. Sometimes, therapy can be a longer process that requires harder work, commitment, and faith in the journey. Many times it follows a slow but steady growth rate that will lead to changes in our brain pathways that eventually help us settle into more permanent changes in our emotions and behaviours.
“You don’t have to be perfect.
You don’t have to be the best.
You don’t even have to be good.
You just have to show up.
To start, you just have to try. ”
The Basic Flow of Therapy
Therapy process isn’t as mysterious as some people might think. It follows a clear line of progression and my role is to help you on this process at a pace that feels just right for you. The below is the basic flow of therapy that clients typically can expect from any therapy situation. While I am sharing this basic flow, just remember, that counselling is a dynamic and bi-directional process. Change is a process. Change is not always linear. Many times it is a multiple-step process and involves taking two steps forward and one step back! This is how change happens.
Upon setting up an initial session, I will send you an ‘Intake Form’ and ‘Informed Consent Form’. The Informed Consent Form helps inform you about the therapeutic process. The Intake Form includes a series of questions that help me get to know you better. If you are able, I ask that you bring both forms to our first session, signed and all. This will help our first session go more efficiently though it is not required.
Assessment: During the first few sessions, my primary purpose is to conduct a thorough assessment of what is going on for you. This includes finding out what brought you to counselling, your level of distress, your current supports & coping skills, and your goals of counselling. It serves to increase our understanding of the problem and guide our work together. At the end of the assessment period, we might outline what we are going to be doing to help you attain your goal(s). We can call this process a treatment plan.
Subsequent sessions involve some combinations of exploration, insight (making useful connections. When our treatment plan is effective and our therapy sessions are successful, we will arrive on the action stage where you begin to learn to apply new skills/behaviours/tools where appropriate.
Ending Therapy: Having a good ‘ending’ is as important as having a good beginning. An ending session gives us the opportunity to remember, review, and celebrate your achievements and success, and to help you move forward.
Healing and Growing take process.
Having a new relationship with yourself takes time.
And eventually,
“There is graduation of counselling”
You come in and we work on exploring your unique situations and issues, correcting limiting thought patterns, changing unhelpful behaviors, and re-aligning you to your own inner compass. After a period of time (much shorter or much longer than you thought it would take), you will move to completion with on-going counselling sessions which means whatever major concerns and problems that you came to counselling with is resolved and you now have new tools to help you through the ups and downs that life will continuous bring.
How do you know if you have graduated?
You will feel it, and your counsellor will agree with you. Graduates of counselling see how their choices have shaped their experiences, are committed to continuous self-care, and self-reflection practices that they have learned and developed during counselling sessions. Now, your life feels gradually good and you are reasonably happy with who you are.
“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass,
it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
Therapy Approach
My approach to therapy is to create a calming and supportive connection with you so that we can address your complex emotions that come with feeling anxious, overwhelmed, lost, or just not yourself. I understand how our unprocessed human emotions & traumas can impact our mental health.
Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB), which is also called “relational neuroscience”, has been a huge integral part of my therapeutic understanding of the subjective experiences and sufferings of the human mind, body, and spirit as a whole, and helps better assist my clients to reconnect brains and bodies for emotional and physical healing.
Each person has a unique set of needs and requires a customized therapeutic approach in order to reach therapeutic goals. I am constantly learning new approaches and techniques to better serve the unique needs of each client. I offer therapy in areas including anxiety, depression, addiction, relationship issues, family or marital concerns, personal boundaries, life transitions, and Trauma-related (PTSD/CPTSD).
Standards of Practice
I will provide you with “unconditional positive regards” and “respect”.
Strict confidentiality (however, there are a few important limitations to this as described in the informed consent form and I will definitely discuss this with you in our first session).
You have the right of privacy. This means you have the right to deny exploring a given topic if it feels unsafe for you. This also means you get to set the pace for therapy (i.e. how deep/personal & how fast).
If at any point you find that something in therapy isn’t working well for you, please don’t hesitate to bring it up in session. I am open to making adjustments to better suit your needs/goals. You come first and you are important!
Benefits oF Therapy
Increased self-awareness
Increased insight in the relationship
Gaining more ‘tools’ that help in dealing with life’s stressors
A safe & accepting relationship
A safe place to try out new behaviours and communication tactics
Greater peace and emotional regulations
Healing from past and present pain
A place where you have permission to focus on you and your needs
The opportunity to brainstorm strategies for positive change with a person who’s been educated in the field of psychology and genuinely cares about your well-being.