[MUSIC] Good day, I'm going to talk today about psychotherapy, which is a very important possible treatment to improve mental health and work towards recovery. There are many kinds of therapies that range from providing important support, to which other treatments may be added, through help with changing thinking, feeling, behavior, strengthening our sense of help. Helping us develop our flexibility and resilience, and to help us resolve losses and traumas. In many other MOOC talks, you will have heard about how important relationships are for our development as a young person, and then throughout our life and for our well-being. I've talked about the way that they shape our early attachment relationships. And how at times of stress or trauma, much of our best recovery is done in relationships. We are social beings. Tony Corneau has spoken about the way we connect with another person to creatively grow our sense of selves. So simply put, psychotherapy is where someone who is a trained clinician meets with us to connect in a positive way, to help us with aspects of ourselves. While we know this connecting is good medicine, we are more than ever aware that it's good science and an art. [MUSIC] When some people think of psychotherapy, they think of psychoanalytic therapy. And that's certainly where we have learned a lot about psychotherapy. Sigmund Freud, in his work at the beginning of the last century, was trying to help people recover from troubling psychiatric and neurological symptoms. He found hypnosis useful. But then discovered the talking cure, whereby he asked the patient to say whatever came into their mind while he deeply listened. And then said something when he thought it was useful, making links between past experience and current thoughts, feelings and behaviors. He found that many patterns of behavior and symptoms had some of their origin in childhood. This kind of therapy considered that our minds are dynamic and changing but can get stuck in certain kinds of patterns of relating, thinking, and feeling. The idea of psychodynamics is that sometimes we don't know why we feel, think, or do something. We're not conscious of how it came about. We learned it back then. But now we need to change. That was then, this is now. And we need a different kind of response in being. So psychoanalytic therapy and psychodynamic therapy have continued, to this day, to pay close attention to building a therapeutic relationship where someone who can speak their mind safely. And work with the psychotherapist to know themselves more and shift stuck patterns, to become conscious, free, and flexible. This form of therapy recognizes that we tend to repeat our earliest relationships. Those attachment templates we spoke about in an earlier talk can become activated in certain circumstances. Therapy offers a chance to notice when they're activated between therapist and patient, for example. The patient might get angry when their feeling dismissed by the psychotherapist. And together, they might come to realize that dismissing was something that, for example, the patient's father or mother often did. In feeling it, thinking about it, and reflecting on it together, the patient often shifts in how they feel and resolves some of the old hurt. And if hurt happens, learns to handle it more directly in the relationship. You can possibly understand that this kind of close emotional and thinking work takes a sense of safety and trust. This is why most psychotherapies happen with an agreed contract about how we will meet. The participants usually try and meet at the same time and in the same place, to build a sense of reliability and trust. When there are shifts in that frame, how we feel about it would be noted in a psychodynamic therapy and given meaning. If I miss my therapist when they're on leave or feel anxious, that doesn't mean a dangerous dependence. But it's something that I would bring back to discuss with him or her at our next meeting. Many kinds of psychotherapy have now emerged that come at that challenge of building up our mental health from all sorts of models and ways of understanding. One of the big ones is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which is based in our understanding that we learn so much that shapes us. And if we take the time to unpack those thoughts and feelings and behaviors that seem automatic, we will notice that we can shift them. It is therapy that seeks to build us up through discussion, practice, and homework. And the therapist can seem a little like a coach, encouraging us towards change and skill building and new learning, while helping keep us on track. Other forms of therapy these days are based on mindfulness and we have spoken about this. Other therapies acknowledge that we live and grow in families. And so the therapist engages with the family or couple. To help those people live, love, work, and play more comfortably together. Other therapies encourage us to accept in a radical way that difficult stuff has happened, so we're then free to live in the moment now. Now, you could probably realize that for some people who have never felt safe, psychotherapy can seem particularly daunting, terrifying even. However, it is one of the ways that we can really have a positive experience of relationship, if we're ready and stable enough in our other supports. Sometimes we use therapy as a pre-therapy to build supports. The keys to a successful psychotherapy for us as consumers, carers, and clinicians is in knowing what the choices around therapy are, what the therapy is trying to achieve. Having a good connection with a trained and supervised psychotherapist. And planning ahead for times that might be stressful or difficult with a good care plan. [MUSIC]
