TRIED THERAPY BEFORE
AND IT DIDN'T WORK?
Read why Clarity Counseling is different.
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we don't do journaling out loud
Some forms of therapy can be the equivalent to what we call "journaling out loud" where each session is comprised of whatever you feel like sharing about from your week or your past. While this type of process is important to the counseling process and does occur in some amount each week, this isn't the work of therapy that facilitates healing. In our view, you will feel temporary relief from doing this in the same way that you do when journaling or talking to a friend. In counseling jargon we call this "catharsis."
resilient relief
Many times, the relief that therapy offers just doesn't seem to last. While that is something that does happen (and there's no shame when it does!), our belief is that sometimes this unnecessarily happens when therapists "hold all the secrets" - meaning they don't educate or teach you what they're doing. This results in you not getting to develop the confidence and practice you need to effectively use those skills outside of the support of the therapist. Understandably, this means you end up back in the counseling office when life brings you something more difficult than you feel confident to handle. In truth, the goal of counseling is to finish in months (not years), and (ideally and in most cases) not need to come back.
healing is hard work
Not just because we talk about hard things, but because we have to create new neural pathways (think new brain muscles) and doing this work is the equivalent of taking your brain to the gym. Effective and efficient therapy is hard-but-good and involves figuring out where you're wanting to go with your life or mental health. This means that eventually we transition the focus of the work to determining what we can do differently in the future. Don't worry if that sounds overwhelming! If your main struggle is motivating yourself to do anything at all or the idea of setting goals makes you feel really anxious, then often one of the first goals becomes actually addressing that very issue!
tackle treatment-resistant Symptoms
Many times, we have been successful in helping people who have been to counseling multiple times before and not felt the relief they were looking for - either at all or that didn't last after treatment ended. We describe these folks as having "treatment-resistant" symptoms. Part of how we're able to be effective in these scenarios is by not just focusing on your present symptoms, but instead focusing on the root causes of the symptoms and addressing those. Further, we stay fairly true to research-based practices as they were designed, whereas a common practice in the counseling world is to draw single exercises from multiple different practices or theories in a way that has little research support.