How to Facilitate Therapeutic Progress When Going to the Psychologist? 6 Practical Keys

Going to the psychologist can be a truly revealing situation. In your consultation we can discover more deeply who we are, learning more about ourselves and discovering ways to be happier and better people.

Many people go to the therapist with the clear idea of ​​feeling good, however, after the first session, confusion, some frustration and even disappointment may appear since we have very high expectations about how our lives will improve in the short term.

The truth is that psychotherapy is a healing and improvement process that, although effective, takes time. It is not automatic: we are going to need several sessions, and in them our attitude and predisposition to change are going to be key. Next we will discover how to facilitate therapeutic progress when going to the psychologist.

How to facilitate therapeutic progress when you go to the psychologist

Going to a psychologist is a beneficial process, but a long-term one. Its positive effects take a long time to manifest and, for them to be noticed, it is necessary to go to psychotherapy several times for months (or even years) so that the small improvements that occur after each session accumulate and give a much greater effect. Good things take time and changing the way we feel, think and interact with our environment does not happen automatically and immediately.

Progress throughout the course of psychotherapy is not something that psychologists magically introduce into the minds of their patients. What happens is that, through a good therapeutic alliance, The psychologist tries to improve the patient’s life by recommending behavioral patterns and, in turn, the patient takes an active role in his or her own improvement. If you go to the psychotherapist with the clear mentality of wanting to improve and change, being collaborative, it will be a matter of time before progress is made.

Psychotherapy has been known for quite some time to be a useful tool, with extensive scientific evidence supporting its effectiveness in treating a wide variety of psychological problems. Whether teaching the patient how to manage a symptom or helping them overcome an entire disorder, psychotherapy is, without a doubt, one of the most solid and powerful therapeutic processes to provide people with well-being, even when they themselves believe that they never they are going to be happy.

However, the effectiveness of psychotherapy depends greatly on the patient. Your predisposition to improve and the attitude you show both in the sessions and in the tasks that you are recommended to do at home are factors that facilitate psychotherapeutic progress. It is the small attitudes and changes in the way you behave and see things that make a person progress when receiving psychotherapy.

Below we will see some keys that will show us how to facilitate progress and improvement when going to psychotherapy.

1. Commit to the regularity of the sessions

One of the most important aspects when it comes to facilitating change for the better as a patient is, without a doubt, attending the sessions. These sessions are carefully thought out by the psychologist. We try to choose the most appropriate time to do them, avoiding them being too far apart in time so that the patient forgets what they did in the previous session but, also, avoiding them being too close together, since this would not give them time to appreciate each other. the improvements from the previous session.

As patients we must respect these times. One day it may be bad for us to go to the psychologist and ask him to change the date, but what we cannot do is constantly push it back. We must be constant. Let’s look at it this way: if we join the gym to get in shape, what’s the point of going once every two months? It is clear that there are not going to be changes. Well, exactly the same thing happens with psychotherapy.

2. Record progress

On many occasions it happens that, when trying to see if we are making progress, It is difficult for us to appreciate absolutely everything that has happened. Human beings do not have an unlimited memory and, if we add to this the effect of negativity bias, it is most likely that the bad things that have happened to us will be seen more easily than all the good things that have happened to us, something that can harm our progress or even make us think about abandoning therapy.

For this reason it is ideal to write down the progress we have made after each session, making our “patient diary”. It is not something that we have to teach the psychologist, unless we want to. It is simply a record in which we put what we have done in each session, what we have talked about, what improvement the psychologist who is seeing has told us…

It is also useful to write down our thoughts, ideas and sensations linked to the problem to be treated. Thus, by having them written down we will remember better for the next session and We can share useful information with the psychologist so that you can assess which is the best therapeutic option or if we can already speak of complete improvement.

3. Maintain healthy lifestyle habits

Starting psychological therapy can be truly disruptive, even though its objective is to improve our lives. It happens to many people that, shortly after starting, they feel confused, tense and with a confused mind. This causes them to make very impulsive decisions, including taking on bad habits such as overeating, stopping playing sports, biting their nails…

We must understand that psychotherapy does not contribute to us being less healthy, quite the contrary. Many people who go to a psychologist begin to adopt good lifestyle habits such as practicing more sports, eating a healthier diet, quitting smoking… they feel motivated to live life and make it longer.

However, beginnings are difficult. Since mind and body are closely related, having bad lifestyle habits can hinder psychotherapy. If we maintain a healthy lifestyle, sleeping 8 hours a day, practicing sports between 2 and 3 times a week and eating a healthy diet Our way of seeing the world will be positive and constructive, something that will undoubtedly benefit the therapeutic process.

4. Identify how we deal with discomfort

If we go to the psychologist it is to improve as people and feel good. He or she will give us guidelines to deal with our discomfort, which will be useful and effective. However, for its effect to be as high as possible, we must limit those dysfunctional strategies that we apply in our daily lives, those that, without even knowing that we are doing them, make our lives worse.

Let’s look at how to treat very intense discomfort. Many times, the habits we take to deal with this discomfort feed it or are even part of the problem. If we detect them and tell them to the professional, he will provide us with alternatives that can counteract them in order to accelerate and enhance the therapeutic progress of going to the psychologist.

An example of dysfunctional ways of managing stress is binge eating. Many people, being nervous, eat large amounts of food, especially junk food. These foods are very harmful not only to our body but also to our mood, making us feel more in a bad mood and sad.

5. Detect situations that prevent us from moving forward

Therapeutic improvement not only occurs in the consultation with the psychologist, but in any important context for the patient. The therapeutic process is linked to the real, everyday situations that we have to face. every day, which is why it is essential to detect those contexts that prevent us from moving forward, which are obstacles to achieving well-being and happiness. We must pay attention to the situations, places and people that make us feel worse or hinder therapy.

We have a clear example of this with people who go to therapy to detoxify. It is very likely that his friends consume exactly the same drugs that the patient is trying to leave behind, so continuing to see them can increase his desire to relapse, ruining the entire therapy. Although drastic, the best decision that can be made to facilitate progress in this situation is to stop dating addicts.

6. Be honest with the therapist

It is true that one of the most widespread beliefs about psychologists is that we are capable of reading minds. A confession: it’s a lie. Psychologists cannot know what a person is thinking just by looking at their eyes. It is one thing to interpret microgestures, capable of evoking emotions, and another thing is all the complex thoughts, experiences and feelings that are hidden behind those eyes.

For this reason, if as patients we want to see therapeutic progress when going to the psychologist, we must be honest with him. Let’s not get confused, we are not saying that absolutely everything should be said, including all types of intimacies. No, The idea of ​​being honest is to talk about the problem that bothers us, without lying and saying what we believe is necessary for the psychologist to know.

If we consider that there are things that the psychologist should know but we are afraid of them telling other people, we should not worry. Psychologists have an ethical code that prevents us from sharing secrets with third parties, as long as the information revealed by the patient does not imply a danger to them or others. For example, a patient telling us that he likes to watch pornography is something very different from him revealing to us that he constantly abuses minors.

And what things do not need to be done to progress?

There are several myths that surround what patients should do as soon as they enter a psychologist’s office. Today, many think that by doing certain actions they will guarantee therapeutic progress. Although it is not that they necessarily hinder it, it is worth saying that they are not necessary. There are many beliefs in popular culture about what the patient should do that are harmful since they make psychotherapy look like something very different from what it really is. Let’s look at a few.

1. You don’t have to tell absolutely everything

Although it is true that psychologists ask many questions and for the therapeutic process to occur it is necessary for the patient to do their part and be sincere, it is not necessary for them to talk about absolutely everything. It is difficult for all people to open up to a person as soon as they meet them and it is normal for the patient to feel uncomfortable during the first sessions. It is not necessary to answer all the questions asked at the beginning. The psychologist will work with the useful information that the patient has given him.

2. It is not necessary to talk about childhood

A well-established belief in society is that the first thing to do as soon as you start therapy is to talk about your childhood. This is actually contraindicated, since for many people talking about their childhood is not something comfortable and starting psychotherapy with something as emotionally intense as childhood can mean that the patient only shows up for the first session and never wants to return.

For this reason, most psychologists prefer to talk about the present, about the current situation of discomfort for which the patient has come for consultation. If he or she wants to talk about childhood of his or her own free will, he or she can do so, as long as it is related to the reason for the consultation and it is considered necessary for the psychologist to know. It is true that this can help the patient understand himself, but it is not an essential condition to facilitate therapeutic progress.

3. The psychologist is not an absolute authority

A myth among many patients is that you have to listen to the psychologist in everything. The psychologist is still a person and does not possess the absolute truth. Psychotherapy works in the following way: the person comes to consultation with a problem that they cannot solve on their own. The psychologist, as a professional, tries to help her by making her see a new vision of that problem. based on the professional knowledge that the therapist has acquired during his training in psychology.

However, the fact that psychotherapy is like this does not mean that the patient cannot question what the psychologist tells him. The psychologist does not force nor can he expect the patient to obey without question, but rather recommends what he should do. He, too, cannot decide to stop helping the patient for “disobeying” him. The psychologist is an expert in psychology, but the patient is an expert in her life. Although it is advisable to follow the professional’s advice, failure to do so does not mean that the therapeutic process will be ruined.

4. You have to do all the homework you send home

Closely related to the previous point, the patient is still the one who decides whether or not to pay attention to what the psychologist has told him. As we said, it is preferable to follow the psychologist’s recommendations, since doing so will most likely enhance therapeutic progress. However, they should not be seen as tasks that must be done no matter what, like when we went to school and they sent us homework.

Many patients do not take this into account and, when they do not do these “homework,” they stop going to therapy because they fear that the psychologist will get angry. with them for not having done their homework. Psychologists suggest tasks, tasks that in principle will help the patient, but they cannot force them nor will they get angry because they have not done them. They are optional tasks and there is nothing wrong with not doing them. The worst that can happen if you don’t do them is not moving forward, nothing more.

It should be said that if a patient does not do the tasks, perhaps the problem is not that the patient is uncooperative, but rather that the tasks that have been entrusted to him are not done under the most appropriate approach. The fact that the patient does not do his homework should motivate the psychologist to change the way he treats the problem, choosing tasks that are simpler and more easily applicable to his client.

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