Therapeutic Assessment to Aid Psychotherapy

There are a lot of people who seem to start psychotherapy, get better, and move on. Easy peasy, right?

For others of us, though, it’s just not as clearcut. Maybe your experiences have been more like one of these scenarios:

• You engaged in psychotherapy (or maybe even a self-help strategy) and at first, it really did seem to be helping, but then after a while things slid right back to where they were.

• You and your clinician jumped into therapy with no defined goals and at first it felt great to have someone to “unload” onto, but pretty soon you realize that you feel worse/no better when you leave sessions and there seems to be no forward movement.

• You went to psychotherapy and told your clinician your goals, but then after you accomplished those goals, life did not improve the way you had hoped.

So many of us don’t actually know what’s wrong, just that something is wrong or that we want some kind of change and hope that the right kind of change will just emerge. We go to psychotherapy and the clinician wants to know our goals for treatment and we freeze. Or maybe we think we know what is wrong, but that ends up being based on something we’ve read (“I think I have borderline personality disorder) or heard (“this quiz said that I’m a hypochondriac”) or that someone suggested to us (“my friends with ADHD are convinced I have ADHD too”).

When we do psychotherapy with either the incorrect goals or no goals, then treatment ends up feeling aimless and frustrating.

Let's try a quick exercise to demonstrate the helpfulness of therapeutic assessment to aid psychotherapy.

If you were to start psychotherapy today, what would be 3 of your SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals?

Yeah, it can be tough, right?

Let’s try to get at this a different way. What are some questions that you’ve been wanting answers to regarding yourself and your relationships?

That’s usually easier – Why do I keep picking losers? Am I always going to be like this? Is it possible for me to change? Is my way of XYZ really a problem? How come I can’t control my temper? Why is it so hard for me to make friends? I could just go on and on...

So, there you go - you’ve already accomplished the first part of therapeutic assessment – we start with the questions you want answered and we end with answers to those questions as well as clearly defined goals moving forward that you and your psychotherapist can use to guide treatment and rewrite the correct part of your story in the way you want. Read these FAQs about using therapeutic assessment to aid psychotherapy.