The Ultimate Guide To Benefits Of Having Therapy ~ 20 Benefits
Most people barely understand what Therapy entails. They think that it’s just a way of navigating clinical depression, roller-coaster moods, or severe anxiety.
People also think that therapy is the only option for going through a major transition, a persistent period of grief, or a major crisis.
Whereas therapy is crucial for all the above factors. It is also helpful for many other factors. You should not wait until things have fallen apart to work with your clinician.
To be precise, therapy gives everyone numerous benefits regardless of the situation, condition, or concern.
It helps minimize physical symptoms and boost your general physical health.
This article gives you 20 benefits that come with accepting therapy.
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The Ultimate Guide To Benefits Of Having Therapy ~ 20 Benefits
Dealing With Toxic Negative People
A negative person is one that makes you feel worse after interacting with him or her.
This person can be a co-worker or a manipulative family member who keeps complaining about everything.
Below are some ways that you can deal with a toxic negative person.
Do Not Play Into Their Reality
Negative people tend to see themselves as victims in most situations. When they mess up, they blame someone else or give a story that portrays them positively.
You might feel tempted to smile to prevent an angry outburst. This seems like the safest option, but it can lead them to see you as their supporter.
The best way is to try a respectful disagreement. You should stick to the facts and do not make any accusations.
Talk To Them About This Negative Behavior
Individuals who create dramatic situations, gossip, or manipulate others might not realize that their behaviors affect other people.
It is good to have an open conversation with them and understand that their behavior is not acceptable.
Stay to statements that start with “I” since it feels less accusatory for others and set limits that work for you to stay on a neutral perspective.
Say No Then Walk Away
Most people have a hard time turning people down. It is tough to stick to a refusal when someone is trying to change your mind.
However, when you decide that your answer is a “no”, do not back down.
This might be challenging when those individuals use a dramatic outburst to convince you. But, if you practice saying no, it becomes easier as time goes by.
Make Yourself Unavailable
Toxic negative people often sense people who they can manipulate. They can move on if their tactics fail to work on you.
If you are not available, these people will stop engaging you. This tactic or strategy is helpful at your workplace where you can make reasonable excuses like ” I have too much work, and so I cannot chat.”
You might make some aggressive remarks, but try to stay calm and not respond even if it makes you upset.
The Different Types Of Therapy For Emotional Healing
Generally, therapy can be divided into multiple types of therapies. Depending on various factors, and on the other hand, different therapies work better for different individuals. Therefore, the need to have various types of therapies.
Psychotherapy is one form of therapy designed to help individuals treat mental health conditions and emotional problems.
Psychotherapy is also referred to as talk therapy and involves talking to a psychotherapist concerning your issues (Learn more about Talk Therapy).
It can be done either one-to-one, couple, or as a group. Therefore, the different types of therapy for emotional healing are mainly based on psychotherapy.
They include:
1 – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT is a type of psychotherapy that deals with exploring relationships between an individual’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.
During the therapy, the professional works together with the person to discover the unhealthy thoughts and how they cause self-destructive emotions and behaviors.
After having this in mind, the therapist and the individual can work mutually to create constructive thoughts to achieve healthier beliefs and behaviors.
Generally, the basic CBT working principles involve identifying the negative thoughts and beliefs and then positively restructuring them to achieve positive thoughts and beliefs.
CBT helps treat a variety of mental issues, including anxiety disorders, eating disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
2 – Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
DBT is a form of cognitive behavior therapy that helps people learn how to live in the moment, control emotions, create healthy ways to manage stress, and enhance their relationships.
Initially, DBT was created to help treat individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) but later treat various mental and emotional illnesses.
DBT is mainly based on CBT but with only one exception: unlike CBT, where you identify the negative thoughts and restructure them, DBT helps accept uncomfortable emotional feelings, thoughts, and behaviors instead of fighting with them.
By coming to terms or accepting the stressing thoughts, behaviors, and/or thoughts, it becomes easy for the individual to change, thereby making it easy for the professional and the individual to develop a gradual recovery plan.
Generally, the main role of the DBT therapist is to help the individual get a balance between acceptance and change and develop new skills such as mindfulness practices and coping methods.
3 – Eye Movement Desensitization And Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR)
EMDR is a type of therapy used to treat PSTD and minimize emotional distress arising from traumatic memories. EMDR works by replacing the negative reactions to the bad memories with positive emotional reactions or beliefs.
It involves performing a series of eye movements repetitively for about 30 seconds, which helps the affected individuals change the negative emotional reactions.
During EMDR therapy, the individual stimulates the mind with repetitive back and forth eye movement, and this process is referred to as “dual stimulation” by the EMDR therapists.
4 – Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT)
MBT is a type of psychotherapy that involves and exercises the skill of mentalizing.
Mentalizing is the intuitive process that provides you with a sense of yourself, and it is achieved by consciously perceiving and understanding your inner thoughts and feelings.
Besides self-understanding, mentalizing can also be used to perceive other people’s behavior and speculate their thoughts and feelings.
Therefore, MBT helps in enhancing your relationship with others through mentalizing.
Based on randomized clinical trials, it is said that MBT can bring long-term treatment to individuals suffering from BPD.
Ideally, BPD causes emptiness or an unstable self-image, resulting in unstable relationships with other people.
This brings the need for MBT therapy to address this bad feeling of emptiness and instability by equipping you with the mentalizing skills.
MBT’s working principle suggests that BPD individuals have a weak mentalizing ability about themselves, leading to low self-esteem and acceptance and poor relationships.
5 – Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy aims to appreciate the negative feeling and behavior patterns rooted in memories or experiences and resolving them.
This therapy involves the use of free associations and open-ended questions so that the therapist can have a chance to discuss what is in the mind of the individual.
Together with the individual, the professional work together to sieve the thoughts and identify those negative feelings or behavior patterns and how they are related to past experiences.
By having these associations in the mind of the individual, then it becomes easy to learn how to overcome these negative and unhelpful patterns.
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy helps in treating borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety disorders, and other mental illnesses.
6 – Exposure Therapy
Exposure Therapy is a form of CBT that enhances fear’s systematic confrontation, either internal or external fear. It is mostly used to treat anxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and phobias.
During Exposure Therapy, the affected individual and the therapist work together to identify the anxiety triggers (5 Services To Combat Anxiety) and then learn the best ways to avoid becoming anxious when exposed to them.
Finally, the individual is set in a controlled environment where he/she confronts their anxiety trigger, while the environment helps them safely implement the techniques.
Generally, there are two ways of implementing exposure therapy: flooding and desensitization.
Flooding involves exposure to the triggering stimulus in large amounts, while desensitization involves exposure to a small amount of the triggering stimulus at first, then increasing it over time.
However, the two methods’ main aim is to help the individual learn how to cope with their anxiety trigger.
7 – Interpersonal Therapy
This type of psychotherapy focuses on individual relationships with other people, aiming to boost the individual’s interpersonal skills. Interpersonal therapy is mainly used to treat depression.
During the therapy, the professional helps the individual assess their social interactions and identify the negative patterns in their interactions, such as aggression or social isolation.
Finally, the therapist also helps the individual learn how to understand and interact positively with other people, thereby improving the relationships.
The 20 Benefits Of Therapy
Generally, people participate or join therapy for many reasons, and on the other hand, there are multiple benefits of having therapy.
Despite that, it is important to know the benefits of therapy regardless of whether you are having therapy or not.
The following are the 20 benefits of therapy.
1 ~ Healthy Coping Methods
Nowadays, being stressed and overwhelmed is a common problem for most people and how you cope or deal with the situations means a lot: it can build you constructively or destructively.
This is one of the main benefits of therapy; having therapy provides you with healthy coping mechanisms that allow you to deal with your problems in a positive, healthy, and constructive manner, thereby navigating through your challenges easily.
2 ~ A Sounding Board
Loneliness is a common problem in life that results in other tougher problems to deal with.
Loneliness brings about being isolated and contributes to overwhelming conditions that already existed in you or even created new problems.
The ability to treat and handle loneliness appropriately requires a strong support system; otherwise, additional stress may occur.
However, therapy provides the necessary support system that you require to solve your loneliness problem.
The therapist provides a platform for you to have a healthy talk, and he/she listens to you while asking questions to get a better understanding of your problem.
Having that in mind, the therapist works together to get the best methods of addressing your problems to find a solution to your challenges.
3 ~ Overcoming Past Trauma
Your past experiences can affect your current or future life negatively if not dealt with appropriately.
However, overcoming past trauma or experiences is not always that easy as it may sound, but with the help of a therapist, then it becomes easy.
Generally, therapists have undergone professional training and practices of implementing science-based techniques for dealing with your life challenges.
It is hard to share or talk about your past trauma or upsetting experiences, but some of your current problems could result from your past trauma.
Taking therapy can help you understand and relate your past trauma and experiences with your current challenges and help you overcome them easily and positively.
4 ~ Goal Achievement
Generally, everyone has the goals which one desires to achieve; however, achieving them might become quite challenging.
During therapy, the therapist works together to help you set your goals easily, which is a lifetime benefit.
Besides setting the goals, the therapist will also help you through your journey in achieving your goals.
This therapy part is very impactful and helps you set the precedence for your future life after completing the therapy.
By achieving your goals, you will have your self-esteem improved and self-confidence, which will also help overcome challenges and challenge you more to greater goals.
5 ~ Improved Relationships
There are many types of therapy designed to handle different life challenges, including relationships.
During the therapy, the professional help you assess your social interactions and identify the negative patterns in your interactions and then help you learn how to understand and interact positively with other people, thereby improving the relationships.
Remember that healthy relationships help us become better people and live a happy life without stress or depression.
6 ~ Eliminating Bad Habits
Generally, different people have different habits, and noticing the bad habits may be quite challenging.
Bad habits usually tend to make existing problems get worse than they were. When working with a therapist, you are given a chance to get rid of your bad habits.
The therapy helps you in sieving your habits to get to know the bad habits worsening your problems and making your life more difficult.
The therapist will also equip you with techniques for getting rid of these negative habits while providing constructive habits instead.
Eliminating your bad habits provides you with a chance of living a happy and quality life.
7 ~ Improved Self-Acceptance
Therapy helps you to boost your self-acceptance. Having low self-acceptance is very bad and results in stress, depression, among others while leaving you demoralized and with low self-esteem and confidence.
This means that you will have hard times achieving your goals as well as poor interpersonal relationships.
Therapy helps to build your self-acceptance through various methods including mentalizing, DBT, and more.
Therapy helps in accepting the uncomfortable emotional feelings, thoughts, and behaviors instead of fighting with them.
By coming to terms or accepting the stressing thoughts, behaviors, and/or thoughts, then it becomes easy for you to accept yourself and make the appropriate change.
8 ~ Develop Fresh and Better Thoughts About Your Life
Besides helping you understand and accept yourself by giving you a sense of your inner feelings, behaviors, and thoughts, taking therapy also helps you develop fresh and better thoughts about yourself and your future life.
During the therapy, the therapist provides you with techniques to develop new skills of having better and healthy thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
9 ~ Easy Coping With Everyday Life
By sharing and unloading your mind and emotions to a therapist helps you get on with your life easily, thereby making it easy to cope with your daily life.
Unloading whatever is disturbing you in mind reduces some weight in your mind; also, having someone to talk to when things get hard and challenging makes you feel free of moving on as you have yourself backed up in case of anything.
10 ~ Feel Free To Share Your Problems
Ideally, people will always share their problems with their close people, including family members and friends.
However, we make those mistakes or situations in our ways that become hard to reveal the truth of our situations.
This could be because you fear that it might hurt those you love or result in broken relationships if you tell the truth.
Having a stranger ready to listen to you and help you then provides an opportunity, to tell the truth of your case, thereby feeling free to share your problems.
11 ~ Easy Problem Solving For Couples From a Neutral Party
Couples or people in a relationship find a positive benefit by engaging in couples counseling, which is part and type of therapy.
Couples tend to become deeply entrenched if they are unable to talk and solve their problems, and it becomes hard to move on with life smoothly and happily.
However, engaging in therapy, the couples get a neutral third party that allows each side to say their issues.
They then provide ways of understanding your partner’s perspective and thereby solving problems easily and coming to an agreement.
12 ~ Providing You With Time To Confront Feelings
Past experiences and feelings might impact your life negatively. Considering that everybody is always busy with life, it becomes hard to find time to deal with your past feelings of grief, guilt, or sadness.
However, therapy provides you with a chance to confront your feelings and come into a conscience with yourself. Remember that unsolved feelings can lead to worse situations.
13 ~ View Yourself From a Different Perspective
Generally, speaking your thoughts and emotions loudly helps you to view them from a different perspective unlike thinking them in your mind.
This then becomes the first step of healing from your inner you.
The therapist also provides you with a different view of things that you may not have realized, thereby giving you a different perspective about yourself.
14 ~ Share The Burden Of Your Emotions and Thoughts
Emotions can become bottled up and can affect your mood and behaviors. Having someone to share your emotions helps in relieving the burden.
Therapy provides you with this chance and helps you cast your emotional burdens that might be lagging you behind.
15 ~ Improved Physical Wellbeing
Generally, therapy is mainly based on mental issues, however, this affects your physical wellbeing directly.
Taking therapy helps you have a better understanding and acceptance of your thoughts, behaviors, and emotions.
This translates to improved physical wellbeing. Also, therapy provides you with more energy, better appetite, and sounder sleep, which contributes to your physical wellbeing.
16 ~ Improved Self-Awareness
The fact that therapy helps you get better self-acceptance means that you will get improved self-awareness.
17 ~ Achieving Your Maximum Capabilities
By getting into conscience with yourself, having self-acceptance and awareness, it becomes easy to achieve your maximum capabilities.
This is all achieved through therapy. Also, helping you set goals and achieve them helps you reach your full capability.
18 ~ Improved Health
This is another benefit of therapy. It helps you live a healthy life by relieving you from stress, depression, anxiety among others. Generally, therapy is a type of treatment for certain disorders.
Yes, sometimes you can handle and manage stress by yourself, however, therapy provides quicker and improved healing to different conditions.
19 ~ Getting a Different Perspective About Others
Therapy helps in giving you a different perspective about others, thereby resulting in improved relationships with others.
20 ~ Leaving Negative People Is Part Of Therapy
Yes, leaving negative people is also part of healing. Different people and relationships impact your life from different perspectives.
During therapy, you get to sieve different people and how you relate with them and then identify the negative people negatively.
Leaving these people or dropping them off your life is part of therapy and part of healing.
Read More
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Conclusion
In conclusion, therapy plays a very crucial role in the well-being of one’s life; it is, therefore, important to consider having a therapist to rush to from time to time.
The above article has provided you with various information and the benefits of therapy.
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