Edit: so please also help me understand this- if a person doesn’t have family and friends to support, sounds like therapy won’t really help this person unless they change their living conditions, or they relapse?
In: 68
Therapy can’t fix your living conditions or socioeconomic status, so if those truly are your primary stressors, therapy might not help you. It could, by teaching you ways of managing stress, but ultimately therapy is not a cost-effective strategy in the wider context for fixing problems stemming from a society that alienates its own members from each other. Spending public money on elementary school teachers, child services, public spaces, low-rent band spaces, etc, is vastly more effective than individuals spending money on therapists and companies spending money on work psychologists.
How and why therapy actually works is under constant study. There are lots of good theories, but honestly it’s not something that is perfectly well understood. What is known today is that more important than the style of therapy being offered, is the patient-therapist relationship itself. A good relationship creates safety and trust, which helps the therapist in guiding the therapy. We also do know that therapy can change the very morphology of your brain, so clearly it does have a true concrete effect rooted, eventually, in biology.
Generally speaking there tend to be two focuses in psychotherapy: Focus in undercovering the real reasons why you are feeling bad and learning to understand them, and focus on learning coping mechanisms and tactics for having a more positive mindset.
There are lots of different styles, and most are some sort of a combination of those two main focuses, and especially veteran therapists tend to develop their own personal styles and are quite flexible in how they approach a patient. When therapy works, like it often does, the end result typically is that you’ve learned to understand your own mind and own reactions better and have learned new ways of handling stressful situations. You have essentially become less reactive.
Latest Answers