About a year after my mother passed, I was noticing more and more how my father was self-destructing. He was not eating well, wasn’t working out, would avoid social gatherings, and would just hide from the world.
Having just been through therapy to address my own grief, I knew how beneficial it could be. But not everyone is a believer.
I explained to him that there are many types of therapies, but the one that helped me the most was talk therapy.
So, what is talk therapy?
Why did I recommend my father to do it?
Put simply, talk therapy is a type of therapy where the patient explores their feelings by talking them out with a therapist. This can be done one on one or it can be done in a group.
There are then four different kinds of talk therapy.
1. Humanistic therapy
Humanistic therapy addresses problems by looking at a person’s life from multiple perspectives. This type of therapy can often head in the direction of the client’s purpose as a whole.
2. Psychodynamic therapy
This type of talk therapy focuses on the client’s past to better understand their present. Psychodynamic therapy relies heavily on the client being introspective so if the client is not already that way, it can take longer than other forms of therapy.
3. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
CBT is focused on changing behavior by changing thought patterns. The therapist guides the patient down a specific treatment path to address how they behave the way they do and why, digging deep so the reaction and the pattern can be different in the future.
4. Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT)
DBT was developed to help people struggling with personality disorders. It focuses on the patient’s relationships with a combination of medication and CBT.
After explaining to him that therapy is customized to what the person needs and is done by a therapist that has no other agenda than to help you be your better self, he was into it. He’s done three sessions now and is already feeling lighter. Even though he’s not his old self yet, he is starting to sing his horrible opera tunes while he cleans again.
It’s a good sign.
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