Is this the right time for therapy?

Life tends to throw us lots of curve balls. All of us will experience points in our life when we feel sad, demotivated or anxious. This could be because of a negative life event, such as relationship struggles, health/illness, career issues or loss of a loved one. It could also be due to feeling stuck in longstanding unhelpful patterns and not feeling like you are living in line with your values. How these negative life events or patterns will impact you will depend on several factors, for example the social support network you have (family and friends), your previous experience of adversity and coping with this, your developmental history (how you were brought up and your family environment) and what meaning you attach to your current difficulties (e.g., tendencies to be self-critical and thinking it was all your fault or thinking it was because of negative circumstances outside of your control).

Generally, the impact of the negative life event or difficulty on your life and functioning and how you cope with it will have a significant effect on your experience, rather than the severity of the event/difficulty itself. Is it impacting on your ability to work, manage your home, play and have fun? Is it impacting your relationship with yourself and others? Have you noticed starting to withdraw from others and doing less of the things you used to enjoy? Are you finding that you've started drinking/gambling/eating/coping in an unhelpful way to push the negative feelings away?

When we speak to a therapist about our difficulties, it is different than talking to friends and family. The relationship we have with friends and family is likely to be a reciprocal give and take, whereas a relationship with your therapist is only about you. In therapy, you will collaborate with your therapist to work on your ongoing difficulties, knowing that you are the expert on you, but the therapist is an expert in psychological theory, knowledge and research which can be applied in a clinical context.

Therapy can help you understand, manage and reduce symptoms but most importantly it can help you take steps towards a more meaningful and enriching life in line with your values. You will take steps toward:

- Understanding how your problems developed and what has maintained them over time

- To find more helpful ways to cope with them longterm

- To explore what really matters to you and take steps in line with that

- Make a plan for how you can continue to build on and maintain your therapy gains

Sometimes other people tell us that we should try therapy (or even 'you need therapy'), however, only you can know whether this is the right time for you to engage in therapy. Therapy can support you to identify ways of feeling better, but it also requires time and effort. Through therapy you can achieve significant and meaningful change in your life, but you may also have to face up to and challenge some of your own assumptions and patterns. If you would like to speak more about the main difficulties you are experiencing at the moment and consider how therapy could help, please get in touch.