Answer these questions:
Do you feel you are generally navigating your life well?
Do feel you have the ability to solve your everyday problems?
Are your relationships generally stable and rewarding?
Do you feel good about yourself and what you’re accomplishing in life?
Are you generally happy and in a good mood?
Do you generally bounce back from difficulties fairly quickly?
Are you aware of what you feel and can make sense of your feelings?
Do you generally behave proactively rather than reactively?
If you answered yes to these questions, you are doing fine and don’t need depth psychotherapy or any psychotherapy. You may need some help from time to time from friends, mentors, or even a therapist, but you don’t need intense psychotherapy. On the other hand, if you answered “no” to any of the above questions, you might indeed benefit from depth psychotherapy.
There are two possible goals of psychotherapy; one is the reduction or removal of symptoms while the other is the deepening of self-understanding which leads to personal transformation. The goal of depth psychotherapy or psychoanalysis is to help you understand yourself in deeper way in order to transform the overall quality of your life.
As children develop, they unconsciously organize their experience in personally unique ways. The essential activity of the mind is to interpret experience and draw conclusions. These conclusions are called organizing principles. For the most part, they function unconsciously as they shape the way we see or perceive ourselves, others, and the world. They determine what we allow into our awareness and what we keep out of our awareness. They are the mental templates that determine how we react and make decisions. Our perceptions create our reality.
In a healthy home with parents who are emotionally attuned and present, a child develops organizing principles that allow him to experience life in a fluid, flexible, and expansive way. On the other hand, in a home that is not so healthy, a child is likely develop organizing principles based on a need to survive and protect himself from emotional pain. Such organizing principles will have a limiting, narrowing, and disruptive impact on the way the child and later the adult perceives and experiences life.
For example, a child who grows up with a mom who is depressed and a father who is a workaholic may organize such an experience and draw the conclusion that people cannot be trusted to be there for me when I need them. Another child who is constantly compared to his sibling who excels in most everything would likely conclude, “I’ll never be like her, why should I even try?” The organizing principle that would likely evolve is, I’m a loser and will always be a loser. One can imagine how such organizing principles could negatively impact and shape the way these people perceive themselves, others, and the world.
Depth psychotherapy promotes a deeper type of self-understanding by bringing to consciousness those pre-reflective organizing principles that negatively impact the quality of one’s life thereby expanding one’s self-understanding beyond its present limitations. One of the surest ways of gaining deeper insight into oneself and the way one has organized his world is by exploring the meanings of one’s feelings. Feelings contain worlds of invaluable information and insight.
As a person’s self-understanding expands, new, more expansive organizing principles evolve resulting in new ways of perceiving one’s self, others, and the world, which in turn, gives rise to new possibilities for growth and transformation. Old self-defeating and limiting patterns of behavior give way to new options for self-enrichment and self-empowerment. One moves from a state of self-preservation to a state of self-expansion as one’s personal will is mobilized. When one is finally liberated from the prison of one’s stultifying, narrowing, and crushing organizing principles and ways of perceiving life, his personal horizons expand in wonderful new directions. The taste of freedom is sweet.