Sometimes a therapeutic relationship can spring the opportunity of deeper and more exploratory work, where we can begin to gain more understanding of how you have come to experience yourself in the world in the ways that you do, and how you find yourself in relationship with others in your life.
What Does This Look Like In Practice?
More time would be taken together to build a relationship and use this relationship as the vehicle to explore and navigate more diffuse and deep change, which is aimed to be more resilient to situational changes. Psychotherapy generally requires a longer commitment than counselling; perhaps a year or two, or more, of meeting together regularly.
In counselling, the focus may be on learning and building skills, or navigating of a specific area of your life. In psychotherapy, we may use the relationship we build over time to understand better your other relationships, and observe changes across multiple areas of your life.
We may also speak more generally rather than focusing on a specific issue, with the aim being exploratory to observe what emerges, and we might speak more about your past experiences than the more present focus on psychotherapy therapy.
Nature Of Change
Psychotherapy certainly has a lot of crossover with counselling, so to help in figuring out whether psychotherapy might be what you are seeking beyond counselling, we can highlight what psychotherapy offers beyond counselling, we can highlight what psychotherapy offers beyond counselling. In my experience this is to do with the nature and depth of ‘change’;
In counselling the issue brought forward is usually more specific, and we find ways to work with this issue, making life changes if needed, or simply spending time finding ways to coming to terms with a situation to make it liveable. During counselling you may have made decisions of what to do in your situation or with your attitude towards it, which creates ‘first order change’. Many people are happy with this solution and find this is sufficient for how far they want to explore and this may be the end of our journey together.
However, being the humans we are, we will always bring ourselves into future situations, including any underlying parts that we may not have gained awareness of that could be driving behaviours, attitudes beliefs that are not helpful to us. It is not uncommon to find the same themes that underlay the initial issues brought to counselling arise in other areas of life, and the need to then return to the counselling room to work with the new issue.
Some choose to use a difficult point in their life that brings them to counselling to begin with , as an opportunity, to ‘dig a bit deeper’ to uncover another layer. Or, perhaps more gently, as digging can be quite tough, allowing through giving themselves time and space, more to come to the surface and shine a light on the issues in a new way . This could allow ‘second order change’ a deeper level of change which might be more flexible and resilient to life changes and circumstances, so that when an issue arises in a different way, we might recognise the root and have developed more tools as to how to acknowledge and work with ourselves with more stability, and know what kind of support we need and where to find it. With time we begin to cultivate our own internal therapist- again, my aim is always to help the client reach a place where they no longer need me to remind them of what it is they need.
First Order Second Order Change
An example to help clarify this idea. If we are seeking to lose weight, then some simple strategies such as setting goals, a meal plan and exercising can help to achieve this.- first order change
However we may find that we go on holiday, or the festive season springs upon us, or a new life challenge arises, this no longer fits.
If we receive more education about food, as well as become interested in understanding how and why we put on weight in the beginning- or why we even want to lose weight, if this is something that is a necessary goal in our lives, this is often a lengthier process but we can take what we discover during this process to create a change which is more resilient to external changes in our life circumstances – Second Order Change.
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