What Do People Want From Psychotherapy?

Why seek out a psychotherapist? What do people want and expect from such a thing? Here's what I think are the two reasons people seek therapy:

1) Relief of distressing emotional, behavioral or psychological symptoms; 2) help getting troubled relationships on track toward happiness and fulfillment.

That's about it. If there are no distressing symptoms (difficult/challenging/painful/confusing feelings; problematic/destructive/dangerous/self defeating behaviors; or some kind of serious and frightening distortion in one's thinking or perceptual processes), and if relationships are happy ones, people do not seek therapy. Why would they? It would be analogous to going to the doctor for treatment of a healthy body with no symptoms of illness.

In the broad field of psychotherapy generally, we like to use words like "distress", or "difficulty", or "self-defeating", rather than always saying "mental illness". This is pretty easy to understand, isn't it? People don't like to be identified as mentally ill. There's way too much stigma attached to this condition. Of course, sometimes it may be an appropriate term. I tend to think it should be reserved for extremely serious conditions. Otherwise, there is no need to overly pathologize people, or their states of being.

It is possible to expand the scope and meaning of psychotherapy to include explorations of distress from a more philosophical perspective. That is, something more analogous to wholistic healing, as distinct from conventional, symptom/crisis oriented allopathic medicine, which generally fails to consider the "whole person", and can thereby potentially create as many problems as it appears to resolve.

A more wholistic approach to psychotherapy would want to look at underlying psycho-spiritual causes of distress, as well as attempting to temporarily relieve symptoms
with partial remedies.

For example, is a person experiencing depression because of a chemical imbalance only, or might there be other important factors involved, like their world view, or unacknowledged, unrecognized, and unaddressed trauma or grief? One could take anti-depressants alone, and may or may not experience real relief, either temporarily or perhaps even more long term. Usually, however, anti-depressants alone won't do the trick. The combination of drugs and therapy has been shown in numerous research studies to provide the best outcomes.

But then we run into the problem that many people, maybe most people, want that all mighty Quick Fix, and then the prospect of self reflection, of self inquiry, of self knowledge elicits anything but enthusiasm. Oh what to do?

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