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?
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Therapy is like turning on a light. It doesn’t move the furniture out of the way but it helps a great deal in navigating the room.
Not an ELI5 answer or therapist, but my simplified experience after my relationship ended, was that my therapist pointed out my flawed thinking and tried to discovery where and how that thought process became “imprinted” in my thought processes. The awareness of the flawed thoughts and why I thought them gave me what I like to call “Pause”. It allowed me to stop and reconsider the situation and if it was logical or based on past trauma. Recognizing that it wasn’t logical and making a better decision was the foundation for “imprinting” a more rational thought process.
I can speak from EMDR Therapy.
For EMDR, it’s a scientific process, that when a person is exposed to bilateral stimulation while discussing or thinking about their memories, the memories can begin to be processed. The brain is amazing like this. It takes a trained professional to carry out this form of therapy. It’s also important that the therapist and the client have a trustworthy comfortable professional relation. It’s not always easy to talk about such topics with a friend you already trust because you are exposing a vulnerable side to yourself and you don’t want it to be told to someone you are going to see everyday and who might have pre-judgments to things you tell them.
Like with physical therapy, where you slowly retrain your body to do what it (seemed like) it could not before, you use a therapist to retrain your own thinking and the habits that spawn from that. From an unconscious “oh I can’t help this” to a “oh, ok I can redirect myself” to, maybe eventually a “hey! I can handle this and it barely even happens anymore”.
It requires willingness to do the work, and forgiving yourself if you slip up.
Rinse, repeat, live a better life.
Now. You said /relapse/. And that’s /addiction/. You’ll first have to identify what the using is for (with a therapist), and then figure out if your addiction is something your environment is enabling, or if your environment is simply just because of your addiction. And what safety factors need to be handled before you do dangerous things in the name of recovery. And, again, if your specific will and circumstances will allow you to survive the transition from worse choices to better choices. How much support you need depends on the person, and a therapist can help you figure out what is needed.
It all starts with wanting the change, and going to a therapists, and doctors, and whatever, to get honest evaluations and to commit to the work needed to get better. If you’re alone, they can help you find support groups near you, if you need stable housing, there are outreach programs.If you need to detox, I’m sure there are services for that too. etc etc etc. One by one, So you have good ground to stand on.
But at no point should you think it’s not possible. Especially before you go and talk to them.
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.
Therapy helps by teaching you how to notice your unhealthy/destructive patterns of thought and behaviour and how to change them. It also offers emotional support in times of crisis.
Over the years, I’ve been in therapy 4 times, each time for about 1-2 years. I don’t consider it a “failure” – that’s just how long it took for me to deal with my various issues (it was something else every time). But everyone is different so others might have different experiences.
Because talking helps you see things from another pov(normally a more sane view),it’s getting another person’s opinion,I find it much more helpful than any meds
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