Coping skills build the therapeutic relationship

You came to psychotherapy for skills to cope with your mental suffering. There are many techniques that can orient you towards the therapeutic attitude of willing acceptance. Because avoidance creates, maintains, and intensifies mental suffering, all of psychotherapy is oriented towards learning to accept and even embrace your thoughts, sensations, and feelings.

In addition to coping more effectively, and while you’re practicing acceptance, psychotherapy is meant to help you feel integrated and secure. I don’t mean that we will focus on the positives until you have more confidence in yourself. Rather, psychotherapy facilitates a deep sense of security as the result of being understood and known which becomes deep self-understanding and self-knowledge.

If everything you thought and did was completely within your understanding and under your control, there would be no need for psychotherapy. If you were having trouble with your mind in some way, you could read about it in a self-help book or on the internet and resolve the problem. None of us have complete understanding or control over our consciousness, and processes that help us further understand ourselves, as we do in psychotherapy, help us gain greater understanding.

Psychotherapy is a place where you are able to talk about not just what is happening or happened, but how you experience it and how it impacts you. We all have a mix of conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, and desires that is the foundation upon which we perceive our world. We act out our unconscious processes when we don’t understand them. In the psychotherapy process, we observe your internal world together, bringing greater consciousness to what has been unconscious. As you come to understand your fears and values, the connection you feel towards yourself creates a sense of security.

Traumas of all kinds inherently create disconnection. They create disconnection from yourself, disconnection from others, and disconnection from the world. Severe anxiety or mood symptoms, which can be traumatic in their own right, can also trigger this kind of disconnection. The psychotherapy relationship can be a safe haven for these symptoms.

Many people are so hurt by others that the relationship part of the psychotherapy process is something they would rather avoid or ignore. It takes courage to face your painful thoughts, feelings, and sensations, whether they are the consequence of intense anxiety or the consequence of interpersonal trauma. The process of psychotherapy is inherently courageous.

We are social animals. We become traumatized within relationship and we also heal within relationship. Whereas your mental illness may make you feel worthless, helpless, and hopeless, techniques to cope more effectively can increase your sense of efficacy and give you hope. The process of developing new skills within relationship can increase your sense of worthiness and of security. It can make you feel understood, connected, and secure.