Well, this is a common question that people would have who may be new to therapy in general. How can I possibly see someone who I don't know, and how can they possibly help me feel better? Well, if you're new to this idea, the thing to remember first is that your therapist has one goal in mind and that is to help ease the burden that you're feeling. There's no other stake in the game for us. We want you to help yourself feel better and to learn the skills necessary so that you can manage things down the road on your own.
We all have areas in which we cope quite well, and we have others where we could use a little bit of help. So one of the first things your therapist would do is sit down with you and determine where are you managing effectively and where could you use a little bit of help, and where you could use a little bit of help, our goal is to kind of serve like a personal trainer for your mind, give you some skills and some techniques that can help you learn how to cope a little bit better.
We may help you, for example, learn mindfulness, where you learn to tune your attention just to the here and now and try to remove judgments from what's going on. We may also look at your behavioral routine, your activities that you're doing or not doing and try to think of creative ways to get you eating well and sleeping well, maybe exercising a little bit more, maybe reaching out to others for support. In the end, we only want to help you help yourself so that you can cope better in the future.
You may be wondering, what needs to be discussed with my therapist when it comes to COVID-19? Well, you get to determine that. You get to control and disclose where you may be struggling, and you, with your therapist, get to decide what might be most helpful in terms of what you need to help cope with COVID-19. There really isn't a set formula.
The beauty of going to seek help is the person sits down with you, spends some time with you, figuring out where it is you may be struggling, and then sets a plan with you on what might be helpful. Then the two of you create a way to test out that plan, learn a skill, and take it out into the world, and see how it's working. And if it's working well, do more of it, and if it's not working as well, you sit down together and come up with a new plan. You are the expert on you, and the therapist is the expert on the theory that might be able to help you, and you put your heads together, and you come up with a plan collaboratively in order to see where you could go to feel better.