That's right. It's my goal in my work with clients: to help people learn the tools, gain insight and self-awareness, build up their emotional relationship with themselves, strengthen their esteem and sense of validation and worth – until they can do it on their own, maintain it through their own efforts.
Therapy and personal growth should be about the transformation delivered: what is it…how will I know that I've achieved it…how long will it take…what will it look and feel like?
Traditional therapy and once-a-week sessions can definitely be helpful and effective, but the open-endedness of the work and insufficient clarity about goals, benchmarks, and signs of progress and success, can leave us burnt out. After all, we're putting in so much effort and not knowing if it's working, and how much longer we'll need to continue on in that way.
My focus has become Validation Addiction and how it impacts our happiness, success, and relationships of all kinds. How some of the messages about ourselves that we picked up over the years rob of us confidence and knowing we have worth and value, leaving us dependent on others for validation. And that's at the heart of our struggles socially, at work, and in intimate relationships.
The work, then, is on using moments in which we are triggered to guide and direct our inner work and reflection. To connect with the feelings that keep coming up in interactions and various dynamics and situations in our lives. When you start to face feelings that come up and name them and get to know them, instead of the avoiding and running most of us have done for years, we start to heal. We start to build up our inner sense of worth and validation through that practice: we see ourselves as worthy and deserving of our own attention, to tune into the triggered feelings and name them and get to know them.
And when done regularly, like any other practice such as exercise, we get stronger, better, and more capable in terms of validation, knowing our worth, and navigating our relationships if far healthier ways. And the great part is that it happens naturally. The way you feel about yourself and treat yourself – your relationship with yourself – is the way everyone around you will treat you.
So, the therapy tip is for therapy to be focused on the goal and aim to get there in a timely way, that's doable, in which clients can continue and maintain the work on their own. That they can take what they learned, all the insight gained, and stand on their own two feet in life as they navigate relationships, emotions triggers, communication, success, and happiness.
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