What To Do After A Session With The Psychologist?

We live in a society of immediacy and we want to quickly cover any need or desire. However, when we want to develop fully or heal emotional wounds, we must invest time and be calm.

Deciding to undertake psychological therapy is a big step. However, the healing process is more complex, deep, and lengthy than some people may believe.

To ensure that the therapy is successful, we not only have to attend the appointment with the therapist on time: the work that the patient does between sessions, at home, is of vital importance.

Emotions have their rhythm

Some people, influenced by the rush and immediacy with which they live, find themselves confused by what it means to carry out therapy and try to carry it out with the same impatience and urgency with which they face all other aspects of their lives.

These people, without bothering to get involved or take responsibility in their therapeutic process, hope to obtain quick and miraculous results investing little time and effort.

Pretending to change all these years in a few weeks is something totally crazy and impossible. People should take the time necessary for the session just held to rest and provide us with all their learning.

Step 1: Rearrange the information and prepare for the next session

The person should reorganize the information obtained in the previous sessions and prepare for the next session. In fact, I always recommend that people who come to my office keep a therapeutic diary to write down the ideas, dreams and memories that emerge between sessions.

All of this information is extremely helpful in helping you move forward in therapy.

Imagine, for example, that a person has been working on the relationship with his father and we have detected a scene from his childhood that clearly denotes the obedience and submission he suffered at home when his father was present.

In the week, or subsequent weeks, with all certainty, the person will spontaneously remember other moments in their history in which they have experienced this same subjection, either with their father or with other characters in their life such as teachers, schoolmates, partners , etc. All this information will be very useful to us to elaborate it in your next session.

Step 2: Assimilate the harmful patterns we have detected

The time between sessions is essential not only to mature new ideas, but also to stop reinforcing harmful patterns from the past that we want to change. Keep in mind that for years we have been repeating negative thoughts and attitudes that haunt us in our present.

Our brain needs time to process the changes, to leave behind the old patterns and reinforce the new connections, much healthier, that we want for our present.

We need time to reflect on the ideas that we have internalized throughout our lives. These ideas, present in our environment and in our family, may be causing us harm in the present. However, changing this way of thinking, acting and communicating with ourselves requires will.

How many therapy sessions are necessary?

If we understand the importance of allowing time to mature one session before going to the next, we can deduce that it is useless to increase the frequency between sessions to try to speed up the therapeutic work. This would be an unnecessary waste of energy and money.

A few years ago, before I offered online therapy, I received a call from a very famous actor who lived more than 500 kilometers from where I have my practice. He was very interested in my way of working and, since he was going to spend his holidays in Marbella, he was willing to travel to Malaga every day to have a session a day with me until he finished his therapy.

After assimilating what he was proposing, I explained to him that the human mind does not work that fast and that it takes time to process what we work on in each session. I told him that it would not be beneficial for him to have a daily session.

Faced with this case, we can oppose that of Manuel, a young boy who worked part-time at a gas station and who could not afford to go to therapy every week. He would come every two to three weeks but took work between sessions very seriously.

As soon as he got home, he would summarize his session. Also, during the weeks between sessions, he wrote down in his journal all the dreams, ideas and reflections related to his therapy and even drew pictures and diagrams about what we were working on. As you can imagine, all this effort that Manuel put in between sessions, translated into formidable advances in his therapy.

It took time, the necessary time, but, thanks to his therapeutic work in the sessions and between sessions, Manuel can solve his problems of anxiety and low self-esteem.