Most changes of the kind I am referring to—fundamental changes in outlook, in daily thoughts and feelings, in behavior—can be made only gradually. Since any move in the direction of change will threaten your existing defenses, resistance and protest are likely to well up from within you. New ways of being will feel intimidating, unpleasant, or just plain unnatural. And this is understandable, is it not? You must confront and do battle against habits that may have been with you for a long time. The longer that undesirable patterns have been in force, the more control they acquire over you, and the more your defenses become committed to preserving them. Change is made steadily more difficult.
Always remember, however, that change can be brought about. You need to be patient with yourself; it will not come overnight. Long-standing habits take time to be replaced, You must have patience, and you must feel hope and encouragement. If you are depressed now, if maintaining your defenses has exhausted you, then it will be difficult to feel the measure of hope that you need to begin the process of therapy.
This, perhaps more than anything else, is the most immediate and perceptible benefit of therapy: a good therapist is a source for hope and encouragement when you cannot sustain these yourself. Therapists are trained to help people who want to change, to bring it about.
THE RESULTS OF THERAPY
In the past twenty to thirty years, there has been a gradual shift away from a medical, illness-based orientation in therapy to one that focuses on personal growth. By no means everyone enters therapy because of emotional pain. Increasingly, therapists are seeing clients who enjoy psychological and emotional good health but believe that therapy can help them lead fuller, richer, more satisfying lives. As a consequence, the objectives of many current approaches to therapy involve more than only the resolution of personal difficulties and crises.
There are many potential benefits of therapy. To varying degrees, all the therapies we will discuss in this book claim to assist you in achieving the following goals.
Resilience and Tolerance to Stress
As a consequence of therapy, you come to be less frustrated by stress, able to recover from stressful experiences more quickly. You become less defensive and more accepting of others and yourself, able to adjust more easily to unexpected demands in living. You have a decreased tendency to hold rigid expectations of the world, so you feel less disappointment and frustration.
Congruence
You come to be more unified in the present moment, aware of your feelings, and less disposed to ignore, deny, or distort your perceptions out of defensive needs. Congruence means a close match between what you feel and how you think and act. Congruent people are well integrated, no longer in need of "masks." When we admire a person's sense of "integrity," we often feel that the person not only behaves in ways that show self-respect, but that he or she is self-accepting, is genuine, and appears to be comparatively free of inner conflict. Such individuals are, in short, able to be themselves. People who no longer are engaged in a battle against themselves and against others will tend to show congruence.