When You Don't Know Where to Turn / A Self-Diagnosing Guide to Counseling and Therapy

by Steven J. Bartlett

Since you are reading this book, you already have initiative like this: you have the ability to influence what kind and quality of therapy you will receive. For you, it will be less a matter of pure luck than it is for people who choose a therapy and therapist arbitrarily.

7
SELF-DIAGNOSIS
Mapping Your Way to a Therapy

This chapter is central to your use of this book as a guide. There are two main ways to use this book to help you to choose a therapy:

1. You can familiarize yourself with all of the major approaches to therapy, weigh their advantages and disadvantages in relation to your needs, and then make a choice. Twenty-six approaches to therapy are discussed and evaluated in this book, so keeping your judgments of their pros and cons clearly in mind can be challenging. Although comprehensive understanding has a value of its own, it may not be essential to you.

2. You may prefer to go through three simple steps to narrow the alternatives down to a small number of therapies that have been most successful for specific goals, problems, and personal attributes that most closely approximate your own. This is a less time-consuming process, and it will take into account professional evaluations of the different therapies.

In either case, your informed judgment will be the basis for your eventual choice. This chapter is intended to help you if you prefer the second route—to narrow down the alternatives in a clear and logical way. If you prefer, however, to become acquainted with all of the major therapies discussed in this book, you might skim through sections of this chapter to give you a framework for more efficient understanding.

The information in this chapter relates to many different sets of goals, problems, and kinds of people. Not all of this information will be relevant to you, so you will find instructions to direct you to specific recommendations that take into account your own needs and interests.

This chapter is where practical and prudent planning can begin. In fact, this book represents the first attempt to match you, your personal qualities, and your goals with the most effective therapy or therapies available to you.

Even though nearly all of the main approaches to counseling and therapy are creations of the past century, it may seem surprising that no unified effort has been made to identify what specific kinds of problems each approach is especially useful for treating and for what types of clients. In this respect, the field of medicine is much better developed. The discipline of medical diagnostics is now on the verge of becoming scientific, and it is now possible to identify for many conditions and in individual cases very concrete and well-defined treatment procedures that are likely to be effective. This has not been true in the field of psychology: most research efforts have so far gone into formulating definitions of the various mental and emotional disorders. But the important work, from the prospective client's point of view, had yet to be done: to make it possible for him to know—in relation to his individual problems, goals, interests, abilities, and temperament—which approaches to therapy are likely to help him the most.