More on the process of change in individual adult treatment:

New Experiences of Self

The foundation of successful treatment is a genuine, accepting, caring relationship between therapist and client. This is true whether the treatment is short-term or open-ended , or whether it is for a limited problem, such as a child’s frequent angry outbursts or a more complex problem, such as an adult’s anxiety or bipolar disorder. As a client, this therapeutic relationship provides you the opportunity to experience yourself deeply and without prejudice and to experiment with new ways of being and relating. In this way, psychotherapy is as much about experience and feeling as it is about thinking.

Attention to Desired Experiences with Others

As your therapist, I will pay particular attention to your desire to experience certain responses from others that are particularly meaningful to you and to the effect on you when these responses are absent or insufficient, both in the past and the present. It is possible that you are only partly aware, or completely unaware, of these needs and wishes because in your past they have been consistently thwarted.  Without realizing it, you may have given up expecting them to ever be satisfied.  The effect that these vitalizing desires--or your automatic repudiation of them--have on your current problems become apparent as we examine your thoughts and feelings and patterns of behavior.  As you share your significant past and current events with me and you hold my experience of them along with your own, you begin to integrate them in your understanding in a new configuration that leads you to feel more robust and less easily threatened.

Revision of Faulty Personal Convictions

We will discern fundamental emotional convictions that you have developed from your particular experiences in life that determine your characteristic ways of seeing yourself and the world and understand their positive or negative effect on your well-being.  As you come to recognize more clearly your intentions and the idiosyncrasies of your automatic expectations about how you will feel in specific situations and about how others will respond to you, you will become convinced that alternative perspectives and choices are possible.  You will feel more hopeful that you can change, and you will be more motivated to do so. Through this process, entrenched, maladaptive assumptions and expectations are replaced by openness to experience, an invigorated sense of purpose, and a heightened capacity to develop gratifying relationships.