Much of our emotional pain results from the way that we view ourselves, in the context of our situation and our relationships. Much of that pain can be eliminated or reduced by understanding how our self-defeating attitudes and beliefs, expectations, behavioral choices, and communication with others contribute to that emotional pain, and then making the necessary changes in our thinking and behavior in order to eliminate that pain.
Individual therapy can help you enhance your awareness of how your unrealistic or negative beliefs and thinking patterns about yourself and others undermine the quality of your life. Therapy can help you change those dysfunctional thoughts and beliefs. These changes in thinking will go hand-in-hand with improvements in your moods, decisions, quality of your relationships, and the quality of your life. Therapy can help you overcome grief and loss, navigate major changes and life stages, enhance motivation, improve coping skills for dealing with stress, anxiety, and fear, and learn to deal with anger, rage, frustration, and disappointment more constructively.
Symptoms of depression include:
Disturbances in sleep and appetite
Disturbances in concentration, memory, and decision making ability
Misplaced guilt, self-blame, and shame
Pessimism about the future
A tendency to see yourself and your circumstances in the worst possible light
Social withdrawal
Passivity, lack of assertiveness
Low energy, reduced activity levels, and loss of interest and motivation to engage in activities you would typically enjoy.
Depression and low self-esteem often go hand-in-hand. Negative, distorted, dysfunctional beliefs about yourself can lead you to feel helpless, hopeless, and powerless in dealing with life. Individual psychotherapy can help you identify and change those beliefs contributing to depression and its accompanying symptoms and enhance your sense of positive self-esteem and self-acceptance.
Depression can also result from (and cause) magnifying or exaggerating your negative qualities and behaviors in your mind, while minimizing or disregarding your positive qualities and accomplishments. Therapy can help you achieve a healthier balance in your perspective on your positive vs. your negative qualities. Therapy can also help you come up with a plan of action and strategies to break free of the paralysis and inability to act that often comes with depression.
Therapy can help you identify and work through thoughts and thought patterns involving guilt, shame, and self-blame.
In therapy, we may also explore lifestyle changes you might make in order to alleviate depression, such as habits related to sleep, diet, chemicals, and exercise. We may also explore changes you might make in your physical, occupational, recreational, and social environment. The choices you make regarding relationships (who you spend time with and your patterns in those relationships) may have a major impact on your moods.
Grief is an intense negative emotional reaction to the loss of something very important to you. Your grief reaction may be caused by:
Death
Divorce or other separation from someone you’re deeply bonded to
Loss of job, role, function, or status
Some of your emotions when going through bereavement and mourning can be similar to those you experience when depressed. These feelings can include:
Numbness, disbelief, and denial
Anger, irritability (sometimes accompanied by acting out or verbal abuse)
A deep sense of sadness, fatigue, helplessness
Guilt, shame, self-blame
Common physical sensations may include:
Emptiness in the pit of your stomach
Tightness in your chest or throat
Muscle weakness and low energy
Headaches, stomach aches, skin disorders
Other symptoms may include:
Sleep or appetite disturbance
Social withdrawal, or conversely, fear of being alone
Frequent, intense crying spells
Difficulty concentrating and making decisions
Fidgety and restless, difficulty sitting still
Grief therapy can
Be instrumental in providing the support you need and in helping you develop the tools you need in order to come to terms with a loss
Help you deal with the thoughts and emotions you experience when you lose someone or something important to you
Help you begin to let go, fill the void, and replace lost relationships and activities with new people and interests, and to help you reclaim activities and friendships that you may have previously enjoyed.
Help you reassess and reorder your life values, priorities, and goals
Help you choose healthier relationships, and healthier roles in those relationships
Be especially important in dealing with loss when you feel you have no reliable or available sources of emotional support
It’s important not to make major, important decisions impulsively when working through grief. For example, it’s often best to wait until you’ve mostly completed the mourning process before jumping into another relationship on the rebound.
Anxiety comes in various forms and manifestations. Much of anxiety is likely to be caused by mistaken or dysfunctional appraisal of a situation, usually in the form of automatic thoughts or images, often thoughts or images that we are not fully aware of. The more you become aware of what you’re thinking or picturing in your head that’s scaring you, the less power it has over you, and the more you’re in a position to challenge those thoughts or images.
An automatic thought may either be a very specific belief about a certain issue or situation, or it can be a core belief that causes anxiety across a variety of situations. The first step in dealing with anxiety is to identify the specific anxiety-provoking thought or the more general core belief. Next, assess the validity of that belief. Then come up with a more realistic, positive, functional belief to replace it with.
Anxiety is invariably accompanied by physical symptoms. These symptoms vary from person to person but commonly include:
Increased heart rate, pounding heart
Shallow, rapid breathing, shortness of breath, chest pain
Muscle tension and/or pain and/or discomfort
Dysfunction in various organ systems (headaches, gastrointestinal distress, skin reactions, etc.)
There are a variety of anxiety disorders. Some of these are:
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
Obsessions are persistent thoughts or images that are intrusive and cause distress. Compulsions are excessively repetitive behaviors you engage in to reduce anxiety or distress. The person with OCD experiences significant difficulty stopping these thoughts, images, and actions.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
PTSD often occurs when a person experiences a traumatic event involving the threat of death, injury, or other trauma, where the person suffered intense fear or helplessness. In the aftermath, the person often experiences recurring thoughts or flashbacks, often triggered by stimuli that are similar in some way to the original event.
Specific phobias
A specific phobia is an excessive, exaggerated fear of a certain type of object or situation. Examples include a variety of animals, heights (or flying), enclosed spaces, and many others.
Social phobia
Social anxiety involves an intense fear of social situations in which the person is afraid of being scrutinized by others, humiliated, and embarrassed. Social anxiety is typically caused by certain core beliefs, which may include:
There’s no point in letting someone get close, because it won’t work out – I’ll just get hurt.
I don’t measure up.
It’s inevitable that others will judge, criticize, reject, or abandon me.
People won’t like or accept me if I’m not perfect.
It’s catastrophic – the end of the world – if someone doesn’t like me. It’s absolutely essential that everyone like me.
Panic disorder:
Panic attacks involve intense episodes of anxiety, with racing, pounding heart beat, trembling, shortness of breath, often with fearful thoughts of losing control, going crazy, or dying.
Generalized anxiety disorder
This disorder is characterized by excessive general anxiety and worry, not limited to a specific object or situation. Accompanying symptoms may include:
restlessness
fatigue
difficulty concentrating
irritability
sleep disturbance
muscle tension
In many cases, the best way to overcome your anxiety, especially phobias, is to gradually face whatever you’re afraid of, in smaller doses at first, then gradually increasing the dose as you’re able to handle it. This is called systematic desensitization, which is often combined with relaxation training. Total avoidance of what causes you anxiety can result in increasing paralysis, painting yourself into a corner. Facing your anxiety in an overwhelming dose likely results in becoming more fearful, magnifying your sense of helplessness and your desire to avoid the source of your anxiety. Facing your fear at first in small doses, and gradually increasing the dose, is likely to give you success experiences and gradually increase your confidence and sense of mastery, resulting in reduced fear.
Part of the key to recovering from anxiety is learning how you’re thinking and acting that causes the anxiety to increase or decrease – and learning to think and act differently.