5 Ways to Get Better Results in Therapy (The Tips We Use)
Two of the most important ways to make therapy successful are to set and track therapy goals and to build a good relationship with your therapist.
While these may seem like separate steps, they are part of the same process. Your relationship with your therapist depends not only on how good of a match you are, but on your level of self-awareness around what you want to change.
By thinking about what you want to change in your life and shaping your aspirations into concrete goals, you can give yourself a boost in the beginning of therapy. When you begin with focus and intention, you can proceed with confidence and trust the therapeutic process as it unfolds.
To build a good relationship, you’ll need to engage in the work of therapy both inside and outside of the therapy office. This includes keeping track of your progress and discussing it with your therapist.
Therapy is an active process and even the best therapists can’t help if you don’t engage. It takes effort and courage to do the work, and your therapist will respond in an inspired way when you do.
Taking the following five steps will help you lean into the emotional work of therapy, deepen your relationship with your therapist, and make progress on your goals.
Understand the nature of the therapeutic relationship.
The first step in building a good relationship with your therapist is understanding the relationship you’re trying to build.
A therapist is a professional whose work requires them to get to know you more intimately than most other professionals do.
A therapist can’t do much if you’re too guarded or passive and don’t let them get close to you at all.
Like doctors, therapists diagnose conditions and recommend treatments, but unlike doctors, they can’t simply prescribe medication or a procedure and give you a set of directions to follow. Therapy only works when you’re emotionally engaged and let your therapist into your inner world.
However, therapists can’t get too close—they must maintain objectivity and professional boundaries to be successful. For therapy to work, you need to share as much as possible while your therapist shares little. By keeping the right distance and setting aside personal agendas, therapists create an accepting atmosphere that gives you the space you need to grow and heal.
Good therapists maintain professional boundaries while forging an intimate connection with you. This allows them to create the sacred space that can only exist when the competing agendas that inform your other relationships are not allowed into the room.
Unlike friends, good therapists only sparingly relate experiences from their own lives, so don’t expect to learn too many personal details about your therapist. Instead, expect them to listen, to help you notice important thoughts and feelings, and to nudge you toward your own insights. Think of a therapist as a wise guide whose job is to help you navigate your own mind.
Communicate openly and be honest. Don't hold anything back!
For therapy to be successful, you have to be honest. You don’t have to tell your therapist every secret you’ve ever kept, but you do need to share everything relevant to the themes you’re exploring and the goals you’re trying to achieve.
For example, if your goal is to improve your mood, but you neglect to tell your therapist something you do that makes you feel depressed because it’s embarrassing to talk about it, you’re limiting how much they can help you.
One of the most important elements of the therapeutic relationship is trust. Good therapists create a safe space where you can speak openly without fear of judgment or rejection. While no therapist is perfect, most therapists aren’t interested in judging you the way your friends and neighbors might.
Therapists share two important motives: they want to help you feel better and are curious about how your mind works. Their natural curiosity helps them go deep into topics most people only superficially talk about—if they talk about them at all.
When your therapist meets with you, they listen for clues to the nature of your problems and their solutions. The more material you give them, the more successful they’ll be in helping you piece those clues together.
One of the ways to deepen any relationship is to be honest when something is bothering you and to risk controversy to resolve problems. As with a friend, you don’t have to tell your therapist every little thing they do that irks you or that you don’t understand, but you do need to bring up major concerns or the things that won’t stop bugging you.
If you feel frustrated or stuck or like therapy isn’t working, let your therapist know. This will give both of you the chance to address the issue and deepen your relationship.
Make your goals clear to your therapist and work together to track them.
Regardless of your goals, the method your therapist uses, or your time frame for therapy, you’ll get better results when you track your progress in therapy.
This can be as simple as taking time every session to talk to your therapist about whether a particular symptom has gotten better or worse, how your relationships are going, or anything else that’s related to what you’re trying to change in your life.
Don’t be shy about telling your therapist what is and isn’t working. Remind your therapist of your goals and work together to track your progress.
While experienced therapists are usually comfortable with ambiguity and the slow process of working through stuck places and blocks, they also like knowing how their clients are doing in their lives outside of the therapy room.
A therapist should accept you no matter where you are in the journey, but they delight in knowing if you’re feeling or doing better. They also like to know where you’re still struggling so they can adjust how they’re working with you and shift the focus of your sessions as needed.
DEEP DIVE
What Is a Treatment Plan and How Can It Help You Track Your Progress?
You might be surprised to find out that your therapist already has a therapy plan for you.
Treatment planning is required paperwork for most therapists in most situations, including therapists in private practice.
(Not maintaining the right paperwork can lead to ...
You might be surprised to find out that your therapist already has a therapy plan for you.
Treatment planning is required paperwork for most therapists in most situations, including therapists in private practice.
(Not maintaining the right paperwork can lead to licensure violations for therapists, even when they’re not working for an agency or billing insurance.)
How elaborate that plan is depends on the therapist and the setting they’re working in. But a standard treatment plan includes:
- A summary of your history and background
- A description of the reasons you’ve come to therapy
- A list of the goals you hope to accomplish in therapy
- A list of objectives, or steps you can take toward those goals
- A timeline of how long each objective should take to achieve
- The interventions your therapist will use to help you achieve those objectives and goals
- An overview of your strengths and supports—things already in place in your life that will help you achieve your goals
Your therapist may also note down which therapy method they are using. Some treatment plans include a clinical assessment and diagnosis, though not all therapists diagnose their clients (private practice therapists who don’t take insurance don’t have to diagnose you to get reimbursed, unlike therapists who accept insurance).
Finally, while not all therapists create detailed treatment plans, nearly all track your progress in “progress notes” they write after every session. In these notes, they link what you talked about to one or more of your therapy goals.
You can work with your therapist to create a sort of “take-home” version of this plan that can help guide your work outside of the therapy room.
One of the key elements you can take away is the idea of separating larger long-term therapy goals from measurable (and hopefully SMART) “objectives” that you can achieve in a shorter time. For example, your overall goal might be “recover from depression,” while a shorter-term objective could be, “Track and reduce the number of times I engage in negative self-talk each week.”
The more “bite-size” these measurable weekly or monthly objectives are, the easier they should be to track. While your therapist will be recording your progress in progress notes, you can be tracking your progress in a number of ways at home. You can use a bullet journal, spreadsheet, or regular journal to make your own personal “progress notes.” You may want to track moods or behaviors or just reflect on your progress in a free-form way.
Even if you spend only five to fifteen minutes doing it each week, writing your own personal “progress note” can help you do more than just track the work you’re doing in therapy. It can help you reflect on, integrate, and solidify that work. Seeing the progress you’re making in written form can even be a mood- and confidence-booster on its own!
In short, putting an action or treatment plan together can be as simple as defining one or more long-term goals and figuring out milestones that will show you that you’re on your way. For example, if you want to change a habit, you can work with your therapist to figure out what triggers it and try new, small changes every week based on what you learn from tracking your patterns.
Do your homework. Therapy isn't just what happens in your therapist's office.
What you do outside of the therapy office is essential to making progress and building a strong relationship with your therapist. The more you show your therapist that you’re motivated and actively working for change outside the therapy office, the more dynamic your time together each week will be.
It’s a bit like taking a class. You can get a lot out of the class just by showing up, but you’re going to get less out of it if you didn’t do the reading. Similarly, in therapy, you’ll have more to discuss and be able to go deeper if you took the time to reflect or try something you talked about with your therapist.
Just like when you were in school, you can't successfully "graduate" from therapy without doing your homework.
Another way going to therapy can be like taking a class is that your therapist will actually assign you work to do at home. In fact, some therapists use methods like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that involve literal homework assignments.
They may give you tracking pages to take home and fill out or exercises to do in certain situations where you experience emotional triggers. They may ask you to assign numbers or ratings to the thoughts or feelings you experience. But you can still do homework and use it to track your progress even when you and your therapist use a less concrete approach.
The Power of Journaling
Many traditional therapeutic styles use dream analysis and require you to record your dreams.
But keeping a dream journal isn’t the only reason you should take the time to write things down while you’re in therapy.
Just about any form of therapy benefits from journaling.
Experiment with whether freewriting, answering questions, responding to prompts, or tracking patterns in your moods and behavior using a spreadsheet or bullet journal works best for you.
In many cases, you can do your homework without even picking up a pen. Did your therapist notice a pattern in your behavior and suggest something you can do differently the next time you’re in a similar situation? Your homework would then be to practice that when you’re in that situation again.
After you try the new approach, you can come back and tell your therapist how it went. As you work together this way, you’ll deepen your connection and make progress on your goals.
Be prepared to deal with strong feelings and unexpected reactions.
If you stumbled into a therapy conference, you might hear therapists using mysterious words like “projection” and “transference.” But you don’t have to pull out a psychology textbook or attend an academic lecture to understand the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship.
The idea behind these terms is that as you get closer to your therapist, you start to do with them what you do in other relationships: make assumptions about them and how they feel about you based on your experiences in past relationships. The closer you get to your therapist, the more intense these reactions will become.
DEEP DIVE
For more information about transference, including a case example and tips on how to work through it, you can read the following articles:
You’ll know transference is happening if you suddenly shout, “You don’t respect me! You’re just like everyone else!” or go home and seethe over what you assume your therapist was thinking when he raised his eyebrow or she looked out the window: “He thinks I’m a freak,” or “She’s bored with me already.” Transference can make you feel like you felt when you were 10. And that can hurt.
Many therapeutic relationships fracture when people start having these intense reactions. But these reactions are signs that therapy is working and can help you get to deep places in yourself. If you hold on and work with them, you can have major breakthroughs. Follow these feelings back to their origin and you can gain insights that will help you dismantle the personal narratives that are holding you back.
Conclusion
Understanding how the therapeutic relationship works can help you get more out of therapy. You and your therapist will work much better together if you’re on the same page about what you want to achieve and if you’re willing to open up and talk about it when things get tough.
As you achieve your first therapeutic goals, you may find you have deeper work you want to do. But at some point, it will be time to move on. If you’re curious about how to tell it might be time to quit (or at least take a break from) therapy, you can read our article, “Five Signs It’s Time to Quit Therapy.”
If you haven’t been able to make therapy work for you yet, you may need to try a different approach—or a different therapist. You can use the search features on OpenCounseling or BetterHelp (a sponsor) to find affordable local or online therapy. An amazing relationship with a therapist may only be a call or click away.