Lynn Ianni (Psychotherapist) gives expert video advice on: Can psychotherapy help me become happier?; How is a therapist's perspective on happiness different?; What can a therapist teach the rest of the world about happiness? and more...
The old school of psychotherapy used to be oriented toward analysis and insight and with the belief that if you gained insight and understood why you were doing whatever you were doing you would have a better way to sort of learn to do new things, almost by osmosis and by discussing how you felt about things that weren't working so well. But nowadays, we are much more solution oriented and it becomes a more interactive process between the therapist and the client so that they actually work with a therapist as a partner to look at what's wrong, make adjustments, learn new techniques and kind of heal all the old wounds and experiences they had in the past that created blocks to their happiness. So, nowadays it is more moving obstacles away from the path towards happiness and recognizing how people can work in a partnership with a therapist in their own best interest to regain what they originally had when they were kids.
Well, I think as a practicing therapist it's really interesting to meet people on a daily basis who are striving to become happier. Because essentially anybody who wanders into a therapist's office usually has some degree of dissatisfaction. Either in terms of their self esteem, an intimate relationship, somehow, some way they're not feeling happy. They're not feeling satisfied and that's what brings them to seek therapy in the first place. So, we as therapists, get to know people from a place they begin and then we get to watch them change as they learn how to create happiness for themselves and generate it in their relationships with others.
I think that happiness is something that's attainable for most everyone, so anyone witnessing somebody else's transformation or taking the time to learn about how happiness is generated from within, really has an opportunity to then benefit from that information and create it within themselves.
Depression specifically if it's chronic, clinical depression is based in biochemistry which also has some learned elements associated with it. It's a long-standing pattern of being dissatisfied, lethargic, the patterns and problems with sleeping and eating, so it manifests in so many different ways in different degrees for different people. So unhappiness, the way I'm looking it at right now is more a state of mind and it's a situational kind of an experience. You can certainly be chronically unhappy but it has to do with your perspective on the world and it's very important and I think probably the most crucial element in terms of looking at whether or not a person's happy or unhappy generally is to recognize whether or not they understand that happiness is their choice or unhappiness is their choice. So it's not what happens to you, it's how you respond to what happens to you that determines whether or not you're happy or unhappy generally.
Some types of depression are very, are best treated with medication and there are levels of depression that are actually psychotic that require more of an in-patient kind of rehabilitation process where somebody's truly so unstable and so unhappy that they would be suicidal or it would impact them in major way in terms of their life. But therapy can always be used as an ajdunct to medication because whether it's out-patient or in-patient therapy it is still really important to teach a person coping skills and to teach them new life skills and new ways of looking at themselves, the world and other people that will allow them to then heal and do a better job of moving through the world in a way that allows them to stay relatively stable.
It not only depends on what type of therapy you're using as far as how long therapy lasts, but also what the issues are and what the goals are that the person has when they come into a therapy situation. So the first session usually I personally, and many solution oriented therapists, ask a lot of questions about what your goals are, get a sense of history, try to share a philosophy of treatment, and before that first session is done, create a game plan together so that you have an understanding of what issues you want to tackle, how we're going to help you move through those issues, and what we're ideally look for as a way to evaluate our progress along the way, so that you really feel like you're going to work together and you are going to know when you are done. That way you're learning tools that you can take forward into your life which helps you feel independent and creates an adult level functioning instead of a new dependency on therapy as a way to solve your problems. You're actually learning to do it yourself with the help of a partner.
I would suggest a person entering therapy ask that therapist what they think, as far as a time frame, given whatever the situation is that they want to deal with. And I think, ideally, within 6 or 8 weeks, if you're not feeling some level of change, you may be needing to re-evaluate whether or not that's the right fit, or whether or not that's the right approach for you. So, at any point along the process, maybe even on a monthly basis, it's really helpful to evaluate, "How am I doing? What am I getting? What do I want instead? How is the therapist perceiving how far I've come, and where do I want to go from here, and what game plan, again, are we going to use to help me get there?"
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