Caring for your mental health is as important as caring for your physical health, maybe even more. However, it’s not always easy to identify what kind of specialist to consult when dealing with mental health problems. In psychiatry, there are different medical arts focusing on different mental health phenomena.
Popular specialties in psychiatry include psychotherapy, behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, family and marriage therapy, music therapy, and the list goes on. For people without sufficient knowledge of mental health treatments, seeking the right treatment can be overwhelming. The thing to remember is that there is always a starting point for everything. If you’re confused about what kind of therapy you need, individual therapy is always a good place to start.
What is Individual Therapy?
Commonly known as psychotherapy, this type of therapy is a collaboration between the therapist and the patient. It’s also referred to as “talk therapy” because there’s really no kind of specialized mind activities during the session unlike in cognitive and behavioral therapy. Psychotherapy, as opposed to other types of therapy, focuses more on the long term.
The American Psychological Association or APA finds that 75% of psychotherapy patients see the benefit of this therapy and are better off at the end of the treatment than the 80% who have not received treatment at all. Even though psychotherapy’s benefits take a long time to manifest, research shows that it indeed yields a positive effect by the end of the treatment.
6 Signs You Need Individual Therapy
Emotions and feelings are part of our brain’s normal functioning. We experience happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, and anger. It is part of your humanity to experience all these emotions. However, lingering emotions that affect your daily life isn’t normal. So how do you know if you need individual therapy? Here are the tell-tale signs that you need to see a therapist:
1) You can’t control your emotions and feelings
We all feel different kinds of emotions from time to time. However, the frequency of experiencing these emotions isn’t enough. Sometimes, you also have to pay attention to the intensity. Are you experiencing extreme emotions? Intense emotions manifest as being overwhelming or a sense of drowning that is often uncontrollable.
Emotionally focused individual therapy can guide you through emotions management. In this program, the therapist will not train you to suppress emotions. Instead, you’ll learn to accept your emotions and develop healthy coping mechanisms to keep them regulated as triggering events happen.
2) You start underperforming at school or work
Does your boss frequently call you out for repetitive mistakes at work? Are your grades going down for an unknown reason? Do you feel that you’ve lost your sense of passion for doing things? Then there’s a high chance that you’re experiencing a mental illness.
Individual therapy can help uncover what mental illness affects your performance at work or school. Moreover, the sessions will also help you treat this illness step-by-step and help you get back right on track. The therapist might also detect certain mental illnesses that require specialization. This scenario is more common in children, such as diagnosing autism and other spectrum disorders.
3) You experience physical changes related to your sleeping and eating habits
Abnormal eating and sleeping habits are symptoms of a lingering mental health illness. Detecting these abnormalities is easy. You just have to assess yourself carefully. Are you always feeling sleepy? Do you frequently wake up at night? Are you feeling full most of the time? Do you see yourself as “fat” even if you’re fit? These are the primary test questions to detect how your mental health manifests physically.
By undergoing psychotherapy, the therapist can diagnose you for anorexia, bulimia, insomnia, and so on. Moreover, therapy will also uncover why you have anorexia (self-starvation) or insomnia (difficulty falling asleep). Hence, everything will boil down to the root causes of your problems. For example, patients with anorexia have a distorted self-image or are victims of bullying and body shaming.
4) You stopped moving on after a traumatic event or grief
Did someone close to you recently pass away? Are you going through a divorce? Are you having financial problems? These are examples of traumatic events. People naturally move on over time. Unfortunately, some people continue to hold on to the painful emotions brought on by the traumatic event, which hinders them from going forward.
Talk therapy can help in moving things along the way. Moreover, it also helps release all those unnecessary emotional baggage that drags you down.
5) You’ve turned to harmful activities as an escape from reality
Substance abuse is a predicate of a mental health issue. If you undergo therapy, addiction to certain substances will appear in the progress notes for individual therapy. Apart from talk therapy, you’ll have to undergo detoxification sessions to free your body from the effects of these harmful substances based on the progress notes.
Moreover, if you’re taking prescription drugs for mental health, progress notes can also inform other healthcare professionals what kind of medicine to prescribe that aren’t harmful to your current mental health prescription.
6) You start severing good relationships with family and friends
Severed relationships with family, significant others, and friends are common symptoms of a lingering mental health issue. The only way to restore relationships with other people is by fixing yourself first. Individual therapy for relationship issues focuses on yourself for the most part. Then, it will find its way to effective and efficient relationship-building and rebuilding mechanisms.
Do you need an individual therapist?
Seeking therapy can be overwhelming because of the complexity of human emotions. There are many kinds of therapy and figuring out which type of therapy you need can be confusing. However, individual therapy is a great place to start. Through talk therapy, your therapist can determine the right treatment for you and decide if you need to transfer to a specialist.
If you’re looking for individual therapy near me, Restore Treatment Center is one of Los Angeles’ top health and wellness centers. Talk to us about your psychotherapy needs today. We also offer addiction therapy and inpatient and outpatient programs. Get the help you need. Call our 24/7 admissions hotline at (818) 351-1853 or our on-site contact number at (818) 806-3914 to get started.
