How can I learn psychotherapy?

  Psychotherapy is a clinical practice activity carried out by physicians guided by the scientific theory of psychology, applying the principles of psychology individually to the patient at hand and providing psychological help to the patient. In the process of learning psychotherapy, doctors should pay attention to the following issues.  1. Combination of theory and practice It is essential to systematically and comprehensively study the various theories of psychotherapy, but at the same time, it is also essential to practically carry out clinical practice activities of psychotherapy. In clinical work, doctors should learn theories and engage in psychotherapy practice at the same time, so that they can gradually improve their clinical operation skills and deepen their understanding of theories in practice. This is like learning surgery, learning surgery, learning only the theory, the examination can also score high, but really to do surgery, still do not know how to operate, encounter special circumstances is still do not know how to deal with. Some doctors may think, “One day, after I have learned all the theories and methods of psychotherapy, I will start to operate clinically”. How to conduct specific psychotherapy operations. Combining books, learning in practice, learning from books and learning from patients, in order to become an excellent psychotherapist faster.  2. Psychotherapy is both a science and an art The scientific principles of psychotherapy are not difficult to understand, but it is not easy to apply the principles of psychology individually to each specific visitor. It may be better for doctors to treat psychotherapy sessions as an art, which requires them to choose the best indications, the most adept problems and the most suitable patients for the doctor’s operational characteristics, to use various theories and techniques flexibly while meeting the requirements of professionalism and specialization, to integrate and integrate them, to give full play to their own individual characteristics and technical advantages, and to form their own unique treatment style and personal style in long-term clinical practice. In long-term clinical practice, the doctor will develop his or her own unique treatment style and personal style. Doctors should not only understand the reasoning in psychotherapy, identify the various phenomena of psychological reactions, but also grasp the fire in treatment, grasp the scale, improvise and work creatively to form the doctor’s operational art.  Currently, psychotherapy is in the process of professionalization, and one of the goals of professional training is to achieve standardization of psychotherapy, i.e. standardization in terms of therapeutic relationships, operational skills, meeting processes and strategies. While learning psychotherapy, doctors must pay attention to gradually standardizing their own operations during professional training, breaking the myth of “optimization” and paying attention to developing and forming their own personal style so that they can specialize in solving certain psychological problems.  3. The relationship between “humanization” and psychotherapy theory and skills.  The ethical requirement of psychological counseling is to respect and care for people, which is expressed in the professional psychotherapeutic relationship, which is precisely a humanistic value. Humanistic psychotherapy is the psychotherapy with the least amount of therapeutic techniques, but it places the most emphasis on understanding and respecting human nature, and it believes that each person has the inner power to grow and improve himself/herself. Humanistic values should become a common value and ethical requirement for all physicians. We should firmly believe that it is not the doctor who solves the patient’s problems, but the patient who originally has the potential ability to solve his own psychological problems, and he is the one who, with the help of the doctor, eventually solves his own problems by himself. According to this principle, it is not difficult to learn psychotherapy, as long as we can adhere to the humanistic perspective and provide the patient with a therapeutic situation and therapeutic relationship conducive to his personal growth and improvement, we believe that he will be able to emerge from the pain and solve his own psychological problems. In this way, the most important thing is to establish a good therapeutic relationship with the patient, to understand, accept and respect the patient, i.e. to treat the patient with the greatest degree of “humanity” than psychological theories and skills. The purpose of learning theories and skills is to humanize the patient to the greatest extent possible in the treatment process!  4.Personal Growth: Personal Analysis and Case Supervision While learning the theoretical knowledge of psychotherapy and strengthening clinical skills training, doctors need to receive regular personal analysis and case supervision to help solve some problems encountered in their work, especially some psychological problems in their personality. It should be said that everyone is not perfectly mentally healthy, and psychotherapists are no exception. If a psychotherapist’s own psychological problems are not sufficiently self-aware and solved, it can seriously affect his ability to help people and even turn the doctor into a victim of psychotherapeutic work.  The supervision system for psychotherapists, first proposed by the psychoanalytic school, has now been widely adopted as a professional routine by various schools of psychotherapy.  When Freud pioneered psychoanalytic treatment, the doctor, as a calm observer, sat behind the patient’s side and silently waited for the patient to speak out his or her free association before psychoanalyzing it with the patient.  Modern psychoanalytic treatment advocates that the doctor should actively participate in the patient’s dialogue, emphasizing the interaction between the two people, which places higher demands on the doctor. Doctors should not only pay attention to discovering patients’ “blind dots” and “dumb dots”, analyzing and interpreting patients’ symptoms, empathy and impedance, but also pay attention to and promptly discover their own subconscious activities In addition, he or she should pay attention to and promptly discover the characteristics of his or her own subconscious activities, such as empathy and counter-empathy for the patient, and pay attention to the analysis of his or her own projective identification with the patient in the therapeutic interaction. This requires the doctor to have the ability not only to analyze the patient, but also to be self-aware and self-analytical in order to maintain the therapist’s psychological health and improve his or her ability to help people.  Therefore, when entering the psychoanalytic profession, doctors themselves must first undergo analysis so that they can gain a clearer and more accurate understanding of their own personality characteristics, subconscious desires, symptoms and psychological conflicts, as well as their own “blind spots” and “blunt spots,” so that they can better provide psychoanalytic treatment to their patients. In order to provide better psychoanalytic treatment to the patient. Personal analysis is generally a long and regular process in which the doctor asks a senior psychoanalyst to do a personal analysis for him or her. In foreign countries, personal analysis usually takes 500 to 1000 hours.  During the course of psychotherapy, the doctor also asks an experienced senior psychotherapist to conduct regular case analysis and supervision of the cases he receives, in order to help the doctor understand the specific problems and difficulties he encounters during the analysis, such as the patient’s empathy and the doctor’s counter-empathy, in order to interact more effectively with the patient and solve the patient’s psychological problems.  Along with personal analysis and case supervision, it is advisable for the doctor to participate regularly in psychotherapy group discussions and business exchanges among professionals, where group members can discuss some psychotherapy cases in a matter-to-matter manner, and where the therapist can receive indirect personal psychological supervision along with peer supervision in the case group.  If psychotherapists spend all their energy and time on learning theories and treating patients, psychotherapists will easily develop loneliness and even burnout, and will be bored with the profession of psychotherapy. Therefore, in order to help patients well, psychotherapists should pay attention to maintaining their own psychological health, promoting personal psychological growth, organizing their own work and life, and dealing with interpersonal relationships in work and life, interacting more with the so-called “healthy people” in our lives other than the visitors, having their own close friends, and being able to have friends when they are in trouble. When you are in trouble, you can have the opportunity to talk to your friends and gain the understanding and social support of others. For the sake of their own mental and physical health, psychotherapists must be “half in the industry and half outside the industry”; “there are friends outside of colleagues and there is life outside of work.  Conclusion The goal of psychotherapy is not only to eliminate disease, but also to achieve health. In the past, people were asking for health from the scalpel, health from drugs, health from sports and health care products. Now, people can ask for health from the psyche, mental health from the psyche, and physical health from the psyche. The success of one’s work lies in the success of being a person, and the success of being a person, the first thing to have a sound mind. Let mental health create happiness in life and promote success in career, and let mental health become the ideal and pursuit of everyone.