What kind of difficulties can therapy help with?
Therapy can be a wonderful place to understand, work through and move on from pain and distress, enabling us to unlock our creativity and imagination, and find a sense of meaning and purpose in life.
Response
Therapy can help with specific issues, like our response to things that have happened to us, either as a child or an adult:
Bereavement
Relationship difficulties
Work stress and/or redundancy
Bullying
Coping with the legacy of abuse (emotional, physical or sexual) or neglect
Acceptance
Therapy can also help with struggles we may have around accepting who we are, such as:
Living with a chronic physical or emotional/mental health disorder
Body image problems - living in a body that we find hard to like or accept, or that we might feel has let us down
Sexual or gender identity
Life Transitions
Life transitions can sometimes trip us up, leaving us floundering. Therapy can help with these:
Getting married, or settling down
Becoming, and being a parent (especially if our own experience of being parented was difficult)
The empty nest syndrome, when children move out. What happens to our identity?
The menopause/mid-life crisis
Retirement
Caring for elderly parents
Internal
And then there are the struggles that are perhaps harder to define or identify the root of, but that cause us misery and can feel utterly overwhelming:
Low self-esteem and lack of self-worth, or self-hatred
Depression
Anxiety
Anger management difficulties
Difficulties in making and maintaining relationships,
Feeling unable to trust others and general feelings of insecurity
Feeling that there must be more to life - that you are only living half a life
Masked
Many people who come to therapy are extremely successful in specific areas (such as their career), but feel unfulfilled in other areas of their life. Sometimes such struggles are masked (perhaps even to ourselves) by problems such as:
Disordered eating
Excessive alcohol consumption or drug use
Self-harm
Intimate relationships where you are left feeling unfulfilled (both sexual relationships and/or friendships)
But therapy doesn't just have to be about dealing with difficulties.
Therapy is a fantastic way to get to know yourself better - a journey of discovery.