The Initial Intake Process at KMA Therapy
'Better' from a psychological perspective involves understanding exactly how it is you want to live your life.
And it’s also about having the confidence, self-belief, and skills to do so.
When I first meet with clients, I always ask two important questions:
- How would you like to be living your life 5 years from now?
- What patterns are you currently ‘stuck’ in that might hold you back from your ‘ideal’ vision for 5 years?
Your answer for question #2 becomes your target area for growth.
All of us have ‘dysfunctional cognitions:’ Fixed, limiting, and usually negative beliefs about our self-worth, value, skills, abilities, choices, luck, and life. Examples of these beliefs are: “I will always be poor,” “My life never works out the way I want it to,” “If I talk to women, they always laugh at me.”
Usually, the dysfunctional cognitions have little basis in reality and actually represent our fears. As time goes on and we live our lives believing they are true, the negative thoughts become reinforced. The neural pathway of our brain is similar to a grass pathway – the more people walk on the path, the more the path becomes engrained in the geography. Simply put: if you think it, you will eventually believe it.
The fears and anxieties not only inform our beliefs, but the choices we make, the confidence in those choices, and the actual results in our lives.
For example, if you believe “Nobody ever laughs at my jokes,” it will have an impact on the way you tell your joke.
Chances are you’ll have a lot less confidence – or none at all and as a result, people may actually not laugh at the joke. Then, your brain is satisfied because your negative cognition/limiting belief has been reinforced.
Are you ready to change your dysfunctional cognitions/limiting beliefs? If so, the place to start is to isolate the belief and change it to a rational, more realistic belief.
This isn’t easy to do, but I’ll be giving tips in my next blog post on how to isolate and identify your limiting thoughts, as well as some exercises on how to begin your work at changing them.
