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When people start going into therapy
and they start doing serious therapy,
or as the therapist and counselors often call it, they start doing their
"work", when they start working on the stuff that they have done
in the past, when they start going through their history
they'll start to notice, the clients will start to notice that they'll have a
number of sessions
and at some point they will wonder to themselves:
"When is this going to end?". Or,
when they first come into therapy they wonder, "Well, how many sessions do I need
until I'm 'cured'. "
And that's a very difficult question to answer
partly because it's like
asking the age old question: "How long is a piece of string?"
Nobody can tell you. So,
if for example, a person has been living with some kind of
difficulty or problem for say, ten, fifteen, twenty years
of their life, they may come into therapy
and think: "it is going to take me 10 15-20 years
again to resolve myself
of this problem. And that's not the case.
Rarely. What
is an impediment as to how fast they will be able to go through and feel
"cured" or "healed" or "free"
from their difficulty is dependent solely
upon how quickly they can
establish a trusting relationship
with the therapist or the counselor such that they can start to
begin to open themselves up and talk about what's happening on the inside.
So, for example, if you come to a therapist
and you sit down for the first three, four, five sessions
and you talk about very little about what is going on in your life and why
you're in therapy
well for this first 4 or 5 sessions
you haven't made very much progress. But,
if in the first four or five sessions you're able to start telling the therapist
about some serious issues, emotional
issues, emotional concerns that have happened to you
recently and how they have impacted upon your life
then already you're starting to make a connection with the therapist.
You're starting to feel some trust with the therapist and therefore your rate
and your speed at which you will be able
to resolve your concern or your situation will be much faster.
Think of it this way: if you go in and if you see
again, a physiotherapist and you have, say a problem with your knee
or you have a problem with your ankle, again you have difficulty with walking
and the physiotherapist says to you: "Well,
you know, in order to solve this problem, John, what you're going to have to do is
you're going to have to stretch your calf muscle or stretch your
ankle or stretch your knee and you're going to have to do it
say, twice a day for two or three minutes
each day." And you start off alright and
you start doing some of the stretches and after the first day or the second
day
you begin to let it slide and so when you see the physiotherapist again
a week later, when you check in with him you realize you haven't done as much
stretching
in that week's time as you could have done and then you wonder why you're
still in pain.
So really the dependent
factor in how quickly you will be able to resolve some of your issues
is dependent upon how quickly you're
able to roll up your sleeves, so to speak
and get down to the business of doing, what psychotherapists,
what counselors call "work" which is
talking about your issues, talking about the stuff that has been troubling you
or bothering you