I. Mechanisms of effective psychotherapy
The effect of good psychotherapy mainly depends on the establishment of the following four treatment mechanisms.
1. The support and cooperation of the person giving treatment. When a person is emotionally unstable and uncomfortable, there is nothing more than the support and comfort of others. A team that had the hope of winning the championship, the results of its participation but the name fell, kill and return, at this time, nothing more than the need for warmth, understanding, support, comfort and rest, rather than just discuss, analyze, criticize the reasons for failure. Similarly, just widowed, lost children, career failure, sick and injured people, the most psychological need is precisely the consideration, comfort and support of others.
As the saying goes, a thousand miles to send a goose feather, a light gift, a word of concern, some expression of sympathy, like a charcoal in the snow, more than anything else can make the distressed people moved, and can make a person who is about to break down magically re-energized. Whether it is the defeated army on the field, or in life, the loss of a spouse and children, people who have failed in their careers, or people who have no interest in learning, the common problem is the loss of hope for themselves, for life or the future. Because after long efforts often lead to mental fatigue, demotivation, loss of confidence to adapt to the environment and face difficulties.
Therefore, one of the treatment mechanisms by which psychotherapy can make patients better is to help them cultivate hope and restore motivation. Therefore, providing appropriate support and assistance to the patient is a prerequisite for psychotherapy, and is also the root of psychotherapy.
2. Cognition and comprehension of the treatment seeker. As the saying goes, only love is not enough. For a person who has been in a long-term disappointment or distress, or who is repeatedly trapped in a troubled situation, it is necessary to further strengthen his or her cognition and understanding in order to free him or her from the symptoms and conflicts that he or she cannot see, and to find a direction for improvement.
Although people generally believe and know what they are doing, in fact, it is very difficult to know what they are doing, and this is what is known as a confused person who needs a third party to help him understand his own motivation. Therefore, psychotherapy is also about helping the patient to analyze his own heart so that he can see into his subconscious mind, understand the meaning of his psychology and behavior, and then discover the direction to solve his psychological difficulties and deal with his psychological problems. With a full understanding, the answers to the problems are not difficult to obtain. Human beings are highly intelligent creatures with strong cognitive ability and high comprehension. As long as they “know” themselves, they can command themselves, manage themselves, and make themselves conform in the right direction. Of course, it takes time, patience and energy to discover the crux of the psychological problem, to recognize its nature, and to understand the underlying motives that you were not aware of before.
3. Training and learning in therapy. Generally speaking, psychotherapy usually takes into account three aspects: first, orientation, that is, to understand the nature of the problem and decide the direction of possible improvement; second, activation, that is, to develop the patient’s motivation to get treatment for improvement; third, change, that is, to help patients actually change behavior or improve attitudes. However, objectively there is the phenomenon of “knowingly” or “hard to change nature”. Some behaviors have become part of the personality over time, and even if they are to be changed, it takes time to slowly learn, train, correct, and change.
Psychotherapy, on the other hand, uses the “learning principle” in the psychological sense to help the person seeking treatment to change his or her behavior. This means that rewards and punishments are used appropriately to eliminate inappropriate old behaviors and add appropriate new ones, while effective methods are applied to train new behaviors. For example, reduce the patient’s own action in the ward to give him the opportunity to “stand out” in public; or to punish the patient’s behavior with electric shocks, and to reward the new normal behavior with material or mental rewards, etc.
The focus of psychotherapy is not only to improve the behavior of the patient through training, but also through the stimulation of their perceptions and attitudes to change. To help seekers to establish a more positive, effective and appropriate basic attitude, which often goes through a long process, time and time again, not overnight.
4. Promote natural healing and growth. Surgeons use needles to close wounds, can only promote the wound to heal itself, but can not make the wound directly recover. Similarly, psychotherapy can only help the seeker to slowly free himself from the psychological dilemma and to recover. The purpose of psychotherapy is to minimize the patient’s psychological stress and self-defeat, so that the patient can use his or her own initiative to slowly overcome and change his or her psychological and behavioral deficiencies.
Sometimes, psychotherapy only helps the patient to get through crises and difficulties, and needs to rely on the reconstruction of the patient’s psychological self-regulation ability when the time and conditions are ripe to promote the self towards health and maturity. The role of psychotherapy is to help remove possible obstacles to the healthy development of the person seeking treatment, or to learn new experiences from past experiences, and to gain new knowledge and skills to overcome difficulties.
In short, psychotherapy is not a mysterious metaphysical art, nor is it a trick of fortune telling, but a kind of applied psychology. It is the use of psychological principles to support a psychological patient in difficulty, from the process of understanding themselves to find “knots” and new ways to adapt, to develop their own ability to cope with difficulties, and to fully mobilize the patient’s initiative to solve their own psychological problems.
II. Stages and steps of psychotherapy process
Different schools of psychology have different views on the stages and steps in the psychotherapy process. There are 3 stages, 4 stages, and 6 stages. We have divided the process of psychotherapy into 3 stages and several steps by combining the strengths of various schools of thought.
Psychological diagnosis stage.
The main task of this stage is to collect the basic background information of the person seeking treatment, to recognize the main problems, and to establish a good medical relationship and set the goals of treatment. This is a preparatory phase and a very important beginning. This phase can be further divided into the following steps.
Establishing the medical relationship.
Psychotherapy relies heavily on the establishment of an interdependent and cooperative relationship between the treatment seeker and the treatment giver, and the treatment is administered based on this friendly relationship. Therefore, the establishment of a medical relationship is very important in the process of psychotherapy. Rogers, C.R., a renowned psychotherapist, once said that many well-intentioned counseling and therapy sessions fail because a satisfying medical relationship is never established during these counseling and therapy sessions.
Another specialist, Patterson (Patterson, C?H), also argued that “counseling or psychotherapy is an expression of an interpersonal relationship.” And this intimate relationship should be cultivated from the very first meeting. The therapist should truly appreciate the situation of the patient, so that he or she will not be afraid to express his or her inner worries and private secrets at the first meeting with a stranger.
The practitioner should help the patient to feel encouraged and supported, to approach and talk with the practitioner, to complain about his psychological problems, and to make him feel hopeful that his psychological problems can be improved, and thus to become interested in psychotherapy. A good medical relationship is established to help the treatment seeker think and act in a more appropriate way. Through the internalization of this relationship, the treatment seeker can try to change himself and achieve the goal of corrective treatment.