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Individual Psychotherapy
Individual psychotherapy has helped men and women work through interpersonal and relationship difficulties in many areas of their lives.
People usually begin psychotherapy in order to address self-defeating behaviors. They know they must change because it’s jeopardizing their health or their future plans or their relationships with family, friends, or coworkers.
The list of self-defeating behaviors is endless. People want to quit smoking or stop using porn or stop abusing drugs or alcohol. They want to control their weight, exercise more, be more optimistic, and stop gambling or watching TV for hours at a time. They want less conflict with their partner or family or friends.
They want to get along with coworkers and to be part of a team. They want to control their anger, anxiety, or sexual compulsions; stop procrastinating; or try to control other people or let others control them. They want to stop spending so much money or so much time online.
Many people have a definite problem they want to address, like, “Is my job right for me?” ” or “Should I stay in my relationship? Others have a specific conflict that keeps happening in their life. For example, they may wonder, “Why do I always end up fighting with the people I’m closest with? “””Why do I keep picking the same type of partner?” or “Why am I so anxious in social situations?” Some people just want an objective listener who will look out for their best interests.
Fortunately, psychotherapy can help people address problems like these, provided they can commit to doing the hard work of lifestyle and behavioral change. This isn’t always easy to do, and for some people, change can seem overwhelming. Despite being in psychotherapy, it’s not unusual for a few to relapse into old behaviors. Just think of the number of people you know of who’ve tried to lose weight.
A key to successful psychotherapy is to know the stage you are in for the problem you are working on. Research has identified six major stages of the change process. While these are called ‘stages,’ it is important to remember that people often move back and forth between stages according to their needs at various times.
For example, if you began to think about change, it would not be a failure if you returned to the previous stage when you thought that change wasn’t necessary. When we make changes, many of us have to go backward before we can go forward again. Let’s look at the six stages:
At this stage you wouldn’t think that you had a problem and you would not see a need for change, even though others saw a need. If you were forced by others to see a therapist, your main complaint would probably be that you were tired of being nagged about it. You might make changes because you were being pressured, and then once the pressure was off, you would probably go back to your old behavior. You would not accept responsibility for your behavior, and instead you would tend to blame outside factors and claim that you had no control over it. While you might feel demoralized, being confronted by others and doing your own thinking could actually motivate you to think about taking charge of your life.
At this stage you would be tired of feeling trapped by your self-defeating behavior. You would start to feel that change was possible and that you could start making changes within the next six months or so. You would admit that there was a problem with the way you were living, and you would begin to try to understand the problem. While you would start thinking about ways to change, you would not be ready to commit to change.
Still, you would be open to raising your awareness about the problem. For example, you might begin asking relevant questions such as, “How is being overweight affecting my life? ”Or, “How does drinking affect my performance at work? You would begin to define your own goals, e.g., “I want to feel better” or “I want to live longer,” and you would not focus on goals that others set for you.
You would monitor your behavior. For example, if you wanted to stop smoking, you might realize, “I’m smoking less than a pack a day now. That’s better than I did last month.” You might also start examining what caused your unwanted behavior. For instance, if you were overeating, you might realize, “When I’m stressed at work, I want to come home and eat.”
Contemplators benefit from emotional support as they begin to imagine what life would be like without self-defeating behaviors. Using the previous examples, you would imagine what life could be like as a nonsmoker or as a thinner person. Your psychotherapy goal would be to help you redefine your self-image, gather information about how to change, and help you imagine the possibilities for a better life. You would want to prepare to make life changes and be willing to deal with the anxiety associated with change.
At this stage you would be planning to make changes within the next month because you would have made a commitment to change. While you might still feel uncertain about the change process, you would be aware of the negative effects of your behavior and anticipate what your life could be like once your self-defeating behavior has ended. This preparation stage is valuable.
If you started to take action prematurely, without the increase in motivation that’s part of this stage, any early actions could interfere with the change process. Preparing to change would mean that you would sit for a while with the idea of change and then set a date for the change to occur. You would make your commitment public.
For example, you would talk to family members, friends, and coworkers about the upcoming change and ask for their support in making the changes. If you were an overeater, you might say, “I am starting a new diet in three weeks, and I want you to help me stay on it. So please don’t tempt me with food.”
You would make plans to take specific steps to bring about lifestyle changes. Your focus would be on the future and not so much on the past. Your individual psychotherapy would include evaluating the progress you made up to this point, helping you think about how you would incorporate change into your life, and helping you realize what effects this might have.
This stage is the one most visible to others, when most of the change activity would occur. It’s the stage where the greatest degree of your commitment would be needed. You would have to work hard at this stage, but if the previous stages were adequately addressed, this stage would have a good chance of succeeding.
It would help you to engage in self-soothing behavior to replace the loss of the old self-defeating behavior. By itself, your old behavior might have been soothing—like overeating or gambling or smoking or drinking or using porn—but it was destructive. It would be important to get some regular exercise and to enjoy feeling good afterward and to learn how to relax. Your psychotherapy would include teaching you relaxation techniques and helping you to stay on track and work through obstacles to your progress.
Sometimes, even though a commitment to action has been made, it would not be unusual if your resistance to change got stronger. It would be as though there was a subconscious tug-of-war over letting go of self-defeating behaviors or keeping them. If this happened, I might suggest using clinical hypnosis as a tool to break through the resistance or to help you relax, or both.
Hypnosis is a proven method of helping people relax and move through barriers to self-improvement. If I thought it would be beneficial, I would thoroughly discuss the hypnosis process with you before asking you to consent to this treatment.
Once changes have been made, the main focus of your psychotherapy would be on how to maintain the changes over time.
Maintaining changed behavior requires long-term effort and a revised lifestyle. Making changes in the previous ‘Action’ stage is often not enough to sustain the change. There may be temptation to go back to an old behavior, perhaps as a way to celebrate having made the change or to see how it would be to go back to, say, overeating or having a drink or a cigarette. Regularly scheduled individual psychotherapy would help reinforce the new behavior.
The maintenance stage would also be a time to consolidate the changes and make them part of your everyday life. This could also be a period of testing your strength against temptation. This would require you to use those parts of yourself that had grown stronger and that cared about living a good and healthy life. Here again, hypnosis would reinforce behavior change.
This is the stage of victory over the old self-defeating behaviors. Lifestyle change would have taken hold, and you would be confident that the temptation to use your old behavior would no longer be a real threat. You would now go on living without fear of that relapse.
Here are book recommendations that will help you learn about and maintain healthy life changes:
“Changing for Good” by Prochaska, Norcross and DiClemente
“Building Better Relationships—Guidebook for Men”
Marriage and Couple Psychotherapy
When we first enter into a committed relationship, we may think that we have found the answer to life’s problems, that we have a partner to share in the turmoil of daily life, that we will never be alone again, and that it will be smooth sailing from here on out. However, if we base our relationship on these assumptions or the fantasy “…if only s/he would change, then I would be happy,” we may be sorely disappointed when our partner fails to live up to these expectations.
All of us learned how to relate when we were children, and we carry this early relationship style, good or bad, with us throughout our lives. By the time we’re about age five or so, our relationship ‘templates’ become a permanent part of our psychological makeup.
While our parents did the best they could to show us how to relate using themselves as role models, for some of us the patterns that we learned at home weren’t the best templates for our adult relationships. Still, many of us began an adult loving relationship and found a way to accept or work through our differences in our ways of relating. Many of us, for example, reached an accord—while we didn’t get everything we wanted, we agreed to do what’s best for the relationship.
But there is a strong probability that if we look to another person to provide our fulfillment, we will begin to focus on what we see as their faults as the cause of our own disappointments in life. This is the reason for a great deal of conflict in committed relationships.
Many people who come in for marriage psychotherapy or couple psychotherapy actually hope that the psychotherapy will change their partner because they are convinced that the partner is the source of the problem. Usually, however, their problems began when one or both partners triggered the other person’s unresolved issues from childhood.
Over time many relationships enter a stage where the partners feel emotionally distant from each other. The initial passion, sexual freedom, intimacy, and feelings of connection with the partner fade. While this isn’t always harmful to the relationship, either person may begin to feel that, although they love their partner, they are no longer “in love.” At the same time, both partners may feel that they have lost themselves in the relationship.
How does a relationship, which may have once shown such promise, end up in a place where the two partners feel distant and may not even like each other very much (even though they feel that the love is still there)? The answer lies within each person.
Two people in a relationship carry with them a legacy of their own fears, anxieties, and unresolved problems from their childhood—more specifically, from their relationships with their parents. It is sometimes uncomfortable for us to come to terms with our own baggage because most of us instinctively want to honor our parents. It is, in fact, so troublesome that we are unable to look within ourselves without professional psychotherapy.
When people do begin to feel hurt, they often reflect on giving so much to the relationship in terms of their time, their energies, and their emotions that they have lost what made them feel unique as individuals. They have abandoned old friendships, hobbies, and activities that brought interest and excitement to their own lives in order to devote time and energy to the relationship. When a feeling of distance comes to define the relationship, resentment toward their partner may emerge.
What is usually discovered in psychotherapy is that one or both partners learned how to relate based on emotional and sometimes physically painful experiences in childhood. And now, when they have a loving adult relationship, they can only use these ineffective ways of relating. Couples fight because one or both partners want the other person to comply with their way of relating.
For example, the man may think that if his partner would only change and live according to his relationship pattern, they would both be happy. His unconscious fantasy is that his childhood pain would stop if this happened. But if his partner doesn’t know about his deep pain or if he/she tries to do the same thing—get him to change according to her pattern—he/she will resist and may even fight back. So they keep fighting the same battle over and over again.
We tend to blame our partner, which is a process called projection. Rather than accepting the fact that our partners are just being themselves and probably have the best of intentions, we define the source of our own anxiety as lying within the other person. When we feel uncomfortable about something our partners say or do, we may not realize that our discomfort may come from a place within ourselves that we haven’t examined—like our own control issues, our jealousy, our insecurity, or our fear of dependence or independence.
Marriage psychotherapy and couple psychotherapy help partners to move into a different and more mature stage, where both of them look within to find the source of their own anxiety, find ways to soothe themselves without trying to change the other person, and learn to accept and love the other person despite their frustrating quirks.
When this occurs, and when the distance between the partners has been resolved, the genuine excitement and passion of the relationship can continue to flourish—this time in a mature, accepting, and integrated manner.
Partners can learn how to hold onto a sense of their ‘self’ while they are in an emotionally committed relationship and how to remain true to what they want out of life while sharing it with their partner. They each can learn how to resolve unfinished family of origin battles within themselves and how to recognize when these interfere in their adult relationships. In other words, partners can learn to maintain a clear sense of who they are as individuals within their relationship.
Partners usually are attracted at first because of the strength of each other’s unique qualities. Both knew what they valued and believed in. Over time, because we accommodate ourselves to both our own and our partner’s more immature qualities and unresolved issues, we lose our sense of uniqueness.
We compromise ourselves with the goal of smoothing out conflicts and fail to realize it when we lose our sense of self in the process. We may find that we have lost those qualities that were once so attractive to our partner. When we hold onto a sense of our ‘self,’ we can keep looking within, gaining a firm definition of who we are, and celebrating our uniqueness.
In psychotherapy we can learn to come to terms with our own fears, anxieties, and insecurities. It may mean accepting our partner’s criticisms as a source of valuable feedback about our insecurities. Self-examination can focus on understanding how and why we manipulate others, undermine our own effectiveness, take a selfish approach at times (or, alternatively, give to others and never to ourselves), and work against our own best interests.
We need to understand why we avoid ourselves, and then we need to make an honest commitment to enter into a path of honesty and integrity. We can learn to understand when and how we protect ourselves. For example, when do we blame others, especially our emotionally committed partner, rather than acknowledging our own participation in interpersonal conflicts? This involves admitting when we are wrong.
Taking an honest approach toward our own lives is a tough, but rewarding, journey into personal integrity. When we take this journey, our partner is no longer feeling blamed, knows that the old emotional standoffs have been eliminated, and will often decide to begin their own journey into self-growth.
Dealing with emotional pain is a talent that can be learned, and it often occurs when we explore and take ownership of our own part in our happiness. In childhood, many of us learned unhealthy ways of handling discomfort, often because we lacked supportive role modeling from our parents or other adults that would have taught us how to deal with pain in a healthier way. We may have learned to blame our parents when we faced life’s difficulties, and then we carry this blaming behavior into our committed relationships in adulthood.
Avoiding emotional pain is the reason many adults indulge in substance abuse or other addictive behaviors such as gambling, inordinate spending, or watching too much television. The healthier option is to make the adult commitment to explore the pain and its sources—and to find ways to make self-growth a friend rather than something to avoid.
This is often the outcome of couple psychotherapy with a professional therapist. When we learn to cope with our own pain, we no longer need to manipulate our partners into making us feel better. Each of us as an individual can then bring this freedom and understanding into our relationship.
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About Me
James Swaniger, M.A., Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (#LMFT 36314), maintains a private practice in Newport Beach, CA. He provides psychotherapy services to clientele from Southern California communities.
Contact Information
Jim Swaniger, MA, LMFT (#36314)
Office: 949-760-7171
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