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Therapy is often stigmatized or highly misrepresented in our culture. A common assumption that people make is that their must be something wrong with a person, or that they are of poor moral or social character if they seek therapy. In my opinion this is a more archaic and cynical point of view.
Therapy, at its best, can be a process that helps the patient gain a deeper understanding about their own unfolding story. Inevitably each of us will face crucial, and sometimes irreversible decisions or crossroads in our lives. A strong and healthy therapeutic relationship can help a patient sort through the pertinent factors, including personal conflicts and dilemmas and give a person a chance to make decisions with more clarity. The therapeutic consulting room has become one of the only places where a premium value is placed on helping a person come to terms with how they relate to others. Relationships take the foreground and patients can learn how to maximize the positives and minimize the negatives with those who are important to them.
A well trained therapist uses his or her professional and personal skills to become an advocate for their patient. A rare and special set of circumstances emerge in which all of the most relevant aspects of a patients story can be taken into account and a person is helped to make decisions that hopefully have a great deal of integrity. When therapy is successful the work deepens and people report feeling like they have more and more degrees of freedom in how they choose to deal with complex and difficult situations in their lives. Both the patient and the therapist have the opportunity to gain more and more personal power.
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