Psychotherapy: Does It Hold the Answers You Seek?

Perhaps we can blame Woody Allen. He was the first entertainer to incorporate psychotherapy into his stand-up comedy routines. Later psychiatrists and those who frequented them would become a comic staple on shows like Newhart, Frasier, and The Simpsons, among many others. Along the way, these TV doctors may have done more harm than good, embedding a series of false and misleading memes into our collective perception of psychotherapy.

For one thing, therapy is not just lying on a couch and telling a stranger about your childhood. In fact, most current therapies focus far less upon the past and much more, if not exclusively, on present-day problem solving.

Most significantly, you need not be mentally ill to see a therapist. Many people who have difficulty with or just need a little help juggling the myriad demands of their modern lives can and do benefit from regular sessions with a psychotherapist. Stress kills, and for many, psychotherapy provides a way to master and control that tension.

Another TV cliché is that of the “eternal patient,” the dependent and needy person who has been visiting her psychiatrist for as long as she can remember. The truth is that, although there are certainly patients that can benefit from long-term therapy, most mental health and quality-of-life cases can benefit greatly from merely a few weeks or months of therapy. Short-term therapy sessions can help patients mend their relationships, improve their parenting, sleep better, control their weight, adopt healthy habits, and become just generally more effective.

This is easier to understand when you realize that psychotherapy is much more than a doctor listening sympathetically as his patient carries on about how her father missed her tenth birthday, week after week. Psychotherapists today typically set goals, and teach their patients the skills needed to achieve those goals.

And although we would not expect the script writers for The Simpsons to be so nuanced, there is a variety of psychotherapy flavors, all of which have different techniques and applications.  Solution-focused therapy helps identify and implement strategies that have worked for you in the past. Interpersonal therapy helps improve your interactions with the people in your life. Psychodynamic psychotherapy aims to give people greater insight into their psychological conflicts and unconscious motivations and feelings. Other options include cognitive-behavioral therapy, which teaches you to recognize and change self-defeating thoughts and behaviors, and acceptance and commitment therapy, which helps you become more flexible in meeting challenges.