San Francisco
Counseling Center
•
About Psychotherapy
Most people
turn to psychotherapy because they are having significant problems in some
important area(s) of their life. Often times, a relationship seems to have lost
an important spark, or the boss at work is becoming unbearable. Other times,
people seek out professional help because they realize that they are not living
up to their potential.
When we are involved in our busy lives, we often do not see how our past comes
up to haunt us. At times, we find we are behaving in ways or experiencing
important people in ways that causes us discomfort, or even pain. What we
learned about the world in our early years helps form how we experience the
world now. It is as if the lens we look through now was ground in our childhood.
Unresolved childhood problems, wishes, fantasies or traumas can cause us a great
deal of problems in work, relationships and even in our experiences of
ourselves.
Psychotherapy can help resolve problems from the past. We can learn how our
current experience is tinted by phenomena from long ago. By working to uncover
unresolved problems from the past, we can begin to come to terms with problems
we could not face, or resolve earlier. By doing this, we can be freed from
trying to work these problems out with our spouses, partners, bosses, teachers
or other people with whom these relationship patterns are really not
appropriate.
In psychotherapy, the relationship between the therapist and the client often
lends very important clues to what is happening in the client (thoughts and
feelings) that are often just outside of his or her awareness. By exploring the
intersection of these experiences (in the therapy) with other current
experiences and experiences from the past (again, including thoughts, feelings,
wishes, and fantasies) sometimes profound insights can be made. Over time, and
with work, these insights can form the foundation for a different way of
experiencing one's self and for different ways of relating to others.
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