The True Meaning of Healing Through Therapy

By Dr. Diana Maatouk

Whether you are a die-hard comic book fan or not, there’s a good chance that you saw 2024’s smash box-office hit “Deadpool & Wolverine” some time last year. The long-awaited pairing of actor friends Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman grossed a staggering $1.33 billion worldwide, making if the #1 R-rated movie of all-time.

Both titular superheroes are famous for their healing factor - a comic-book trope that allows them to basically be immortal. Anytime either is severely injured in a fight, their bodies heal themselves instantaneously. Of course, healing for the rest of us doesn’t work that way, particularly when it’s the type of healing that comes from going to see a professional counselor.?

Many people assume that a session or two is going to “cure” them of whatever their struggles are that had them seek out professional assistance in the first place, but that’s not at all how the process works. If we want to be successful?in therapy, we need to know what that success looks like and remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Defining Healing and Therapy

If you skin your knee on the playground, you get a spray of antiseptic from the school nurse, a bandage, and maybe a lollipop if you’re lucky. Your body does the rest. Healing your minds and emotions looks a lot differently. It’s not as natural a process and often doesn’t start until we take very deliberate, guided steps to begin the journey. It’s not enough to understand what is wrong; we must make changes and experience growth to move beyond the things that are causing us pain.

Healing therapy can have a lot of definitions, including a reduction of symptoms such as anxiety or depression, improved self-esteem, the ability to enjoy life more, or the improvement of relationships. The key point is almost always that we realize that the life we were living prior to therapy was flawed and that we need to improve on ourselves to define a new, better reality.

6 Steps of Healing in Therapy

These six components of healing via therapeutic treatment might not apply to everyone, but they give a good overview of what to expect when you enter into a professional relationship with a counselor to try to improve on key issues in your life.?

1.???? Creating Coping Strategies: Everyone suffers anxiety, stress, depression and other frustrations throughout their lives. The healing process helps you find ways to mitigate and give proper due to these experiences without allowing them to overwhelm you. It’s just not making a plan, but proving that you can execute that plan when times get tough and our minds naturally want to return to our previous unhealthy state - whether that involves isolation, negative behaviors like addictions, etc.

2.???? Gaining Self-Awareness and Insight:? A frequent struggle with mental health is the feeling of being out of control and that the world is happening to us. When we gain self-awareness, we are able to step outside of that viewpoint and understand the patterns in the way we feel, ,the way we think, and the way we relate to others. When we begin to realize not only what we are doing, but why we are doing it, it allows us to gain perspective on what might be flawed and how to correct it.

3.???? Understanding and Expressing Emotions: Feeling overwhelmed is commonplace for people who struggle with mental health. This is often a result of letting an emotion occupy our thoughts and influence our behavior and relationships to an unhealthy degree. Continuing from the point above, being able to identify and understand the emotions we are having as they are taking place allows us to determine which are helpful and which are hurtful, and build better relationships with ourselves and others by doing so.

4.???? Reframing Thoughts for the Better: When we struggle with mental health issues, our thoughts trend towards the negative, even in scenarios when there is no reason for them. We see upcoming social events as potential embarrassment, new job opportunities as possible failures, and even basic situations as overwhelming and doomed for disaster. When we are able to separate ourselves from the thoughts and assess the situation as it is, not as we fear, we begin the process of changing our thought patterns for the better.

5.???? Building Better Relationships: Whether directly or indirectly, many mental health struggles result in suffering relationships with friends, family, and coworkers. Therapy guides us to improve our communication skills - through speaking our minds, managing our emotions, and listening to others. A second component of this is the ability to set boundaries in our personal space so that we have the environment in which to heal and be ourselves without being overrun by other people.?

6.???? Taking Control of Yourself: A sum of all the parts listed above is the ability not only to become self-reliant, but to believe in your ability to make changes in your life and handle what’s unknown in the future. These things take time. Succeeding in one problem area prepares us for the next, but just because we overcome one area of weakness doesn’t mean we are ready to take on all of them head on.?

Building the happier, healthier version of ourselves takes time. Healing doesn’t come overnight, but if we commit and work hard, it does bring life-changing rewards.?

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