If you are dissatisfied with yourself and life, tormented by worries and anxieties, not satisfied with relationships with loved ones and realize that time after time you live the same internal scenarios that lead to suffering, and you cannot change them alone, this is a reason to seek help from a psychotherapist.

Making a decision to help your soul is the main step that gives you the necessary energy to start therapy and a fundamentally different attitude to your life.

Choosing a specialist and method is the second important step in therapy.

You have already realized that you need help and now you need to find the right specialist. One way to do this is to find out if someone in your community has already sought help and can share their experience and recommendations.

It is good to study the issue yourself and decide which method of work is closer to you. It is not an easy task, because there are many directions of depth psychology: Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian analytical psychology and others. In addition, there are alternative methods, such as psychodrama, Gestalt, existential-humanistic, cognitive behavioral and other therapies.

The third step is to agree on the terms of interaction with the therapist and to fulfill this agreement.

The basis for building a trusting relationship. It is necessary to agree on the time and place of meetings, and most importantly, to fulfill the agreements regularly and accurately. This will effectively form a therapeutic space in which the healing of the soul will take place.

The fourth step is to create contact with the unconscious.

Contact with the unconscious, an essential part of the psyche, is a feature of depth psychology. The psyche is often compared to an iceberg, where the upper, visible, part is consciousness and the unconscious is a huge block underwater.

Depth psychology utilizes the inexhaustible resources of the unconscious to heal and restore wholeness. The main methods of work are active imagination, analyzing dreams and images.

The fifth step is insight, living a new experience in relationship with the therapist.

Psychotherapy is a process in which the client, with the help of the therapist, works to debunk pathological beliefs that prevent the psyche from living a full life, negatively affect self-esteem, prevent him from achieving desired goals, make him bury his dreams and cause suffering.

Changing such beliefs is helped by new experiences lived in the therapeutic relationship: the client unconsciously tests his attitudes in interaction with the therapist. In the work comes the realization that the former beliefs are irrational and harmful, that they no longer help as before.

The sixth step is to create a sustainable therapeutic relationship.

The therapist-client relationship is the most important tool for healing the soul. They must be safe. The client follows his unconscious goals and plans in therapy, and his progress in therapy is governed by unconscious evaluations of danger and safety. A person progresses in therapy if they believe they can do so safely for themselves.

The seventh step is to analyze traumas and complexes.

A necessary step in the therapeutic relationship, without it effective therapy is impossible. Often painful reactions are caused by so-called negative transference: the client experiences unpleasant feelings towards the therapist, thus reliving traumas that he or she could not experience in relationships with other people. This is the most dangerous period in therapy, when there is a great desire to end the process, because the states can be very challenging.

The eighth step is the synthesis of wholeness, spiritual growth and development.

This is the stage at which a person no longer feels the pressure of complexes and traumas, can accept himself and is not afraid to come into contact with reality. He becomes internally balanced and begins to trust himself and notices that now his psychic energy is sufficient to release his unique personality from the subjugation of conscious and unconscious limitations. This is an opportunity to go beyond mere adaptation to the collective and social aspects of life and to follow the path of spiritual growth and development.

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The very first thing that comes to mind is anxiety disorder. Therapy is able to reduce it, and in some cases – and remove it altogether. The person begins to live a peaceful life, panic attacks stop happening to him. Therapy also helps to cope with traumas that form negative patterns of behavior, when a person often gets into acute states and does not understand why. In therapy, the client gets to the root cause of the trauma. And so he learns if not to eliminate the trauma completely, then at least to get along with it, to control it in his life.

For example, attachment trauma. For example, the mother was inconstant or the child was often and for a long time taken to the grandmother. In such cases, the child develops an anxious attachment. In adulthood, this person, when creating any relationship, cannot understand why he or she is unable to create intimacy, to get a natural, healthy attachment. In therapy, we find a reason for this. It’s like being sent to grandma’s house for a long time or being sent to an elite full-time school. And then, it turns out, it negatively affects the future, forms a trauma. Then the work of the therapist is to make the person understand this trauma and learn, based on all the consequences, gradually build healthy relationships with others.

Does therapy have any effect on emotional intelligence or is it innate and cannot be “fixed”?

Therapy increases both emotional and social intelligence. When a person becomes more inwardly oriented, he or she is much more effective in communicating with the environment. If we do not notice our aggression, skin inflammations can appear in this place, for example. But if we realize our anger, discontent, know how to protect ourselves from toxic people, then, of course, the quality of our life becomes higher.

How does emotional intelligence differ from social intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is when a person has a good understanding of their emotional life. Not just an understanding of feelings, but the ability to live them.

Social intelligence is the ability to trace interrelationships between people, patterns in actions. In women, it is a little better developed, because they are still in childhood playing, for example, in dolls, and thus learn the first social connections. Boys are a little different. They later learn to recognize the interrelationships between people, groups of people.

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Psychoanalysis – a method of influence on mental disorders, based on the theory developed by Sigmund Freud in 1890. It consists of working with internal, unconscious, irrational drives, defense mechanisms, and unconscious material by making it conscious. It is working with inner mental processes and resolving conflicts between the conscious and unconscious parts of our selves.

Gestalt therapy – focused on self-awareness, based on an experimental-phenomenological approach. In the process of therapy, a holistic image (gestalt), an independent personality, is recreated and strengthened. Gestalt therapy is aimed at realizing and accepting a person’s self, rejected thoughts, emotions, needs, and individuality. One of the main principles of Gestalt therapy is completeness, the ability to live here-and-now, to enjoy every moment.

Art therapy is the expression and exploration of one’s own self through art. Through art a person conveys his/her emotions – anger, joy, fear, resentment, love, hate. Thus, there is self-expression and achievement of inner harmony, release of negative energy in a healthy way.

Existential psychotherapy – implies a person’s search, setting life goals, priorities, what to go for and ways to achieve it. It emphasizes core values. The goal is to get rid of suffering, focus on the main problems of existence, getting rid of fears, addictions, depression, obsessive thoughts, loneliness. Existential psychotherapy covers life situations, answers the question of what happens to us, not how we came to it, helps a person to realize who he is and who he wants to be.

Hippotherapy – treatment of psychological problems, as well as neurological disorders and other diseases with the help of horses, riding.

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