Know Your Therapies - Basic Psychotherapy Knowledge

It seems very surprising how a lot of people who have switched psychotherapies , or have gone through extensive and long periods of therapeutic attention still don’t know even the most common things about going through therapy. While it is true that as a patient ,you don’t need to be aware of each and every tiny detail of the therapeutic process, it is also true that the more you know , the more capable you will be to explain exactly what you want out of your therapist, and what sort of help will be more valuable to your development.
Psychotherapy and psychology are relatively young compared to other fields of scientific knowledge such as physics, for example, but in the short time that they have existed, there has been quite a lot of development and also quite a lot of diversity in the way different conditions are treated and handled. Some attribute that diversity to the existence of different schools , or as most experienced therapists say – modalities, of modern psychology. Indeed there are many ways in which the different theories, combined with their respective therapies, are capable of handling the problems of people in our day and age.
Now back to the point, can you think of any schools of psychotherapy (the Danish term for that is effektive psykoterapi københavn) ? The most experienced ones will surely remember of psychoanalysis – the psychological theory in which in order to find and treat the person’s problems, the therapist needs to dig deep into the patient’s past and find the underlying problems and traumatic experiences that have caused the person to behave in such a way. Psychoanalysis has its beginnings laid out in the works of famous scientists like Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and is a very reliable way of finding the root of problems. The issue with psychoanalysis is that it takes far too much time , compared to other very popular therapies, like humanistic-existential or cognitive-behavioral therapies.
Cognitive-behavioral therapies , on the other hand, can be a lot less time consuming, due to the fact that they mostly treat problems which are known from the start – such as phobias, fears and addictions. In cognitive-behavioral therapies ,the most crucial difference from other therapies is that the patient is driven towards facing his own fears and troubles gradually, until he becomes capable of addressing the root of the problem. For example , if you have a person with arachnophobia , you’d make him first clean the spider webs at home , then deal with living spiders or other insects in order to know that he can handle it.
Humanistic-existential therapies, of which Gestalt therapies are a part, mainly focus on the idea that if a person can find out his true image, he can do something to improve his condition. They focus on getting the patient to know more about his true self – both as a character and as a situation , in order to get him to improve by various different means, including coping with problems and becoming better in general.