Psychotherapy today comes in many varieties. No single therapy theory or technique holds a monopoly on healing. Depending on the particular context—when, where, how, and with whom they are used—multiple approaches, explanations, and interventions may prove effective and helpful. Given this, and the endless array of choices (like BetterHelp), how can you tell good therapy from the bad? Underneath the surface diversity, all good therapies share several underlying principles. Here’s a list of 10 basic, common ingredients of good therapy.
1. Good Therapy Does Not Equate To Friendship
Therapy by design is one-sided. It is about you who is the client. Every action of the therapist can legitimately be directed only toward one goal—helping you. The therapist cannot use therapy time, or the therapeutic relations, to take care of their own needs. If your therapist uses therapy time for any purpose other than to help you, then what they’re doing is not good therapy.
2. Good Therapy Is Evidence-based
Good therapy involves keeping good records, connecting anecdotes into patterns, generating hypotheses and testing them. Good therapy is also responsive to new knowledge. It admits and corrects its mistakes. While good therapy seeks to foster hope and nourish the expectation of change, its promises are tethered to facts.
What the therapist suggests to you – the course of action, the explanations and interventions should be based on scientific research, to the extent that such research exists.
3. Good Therapy Affirms Your Basic Human Dignity & Worth
Good therapy looks to facilitate sound mental health hence it concerns itself with judgments, but it is not about judging people. Most people who come to therapy have been judged harshly enough for their troubles and have also been given plenty of advice. Therefore, good therapists go light on both judgment and advice.
A therapist must accept, listen, and seek to understand, respond appropriately to, and honour the humanity of every client, regardless of how much the therapist “likes” or approves of the individual. And needless to say, good therapy does not condescend, patronize, abuse, abandon, manipulate, lie, or cheat.
4. Good Therapy Encourages & Models Accurate, Honest & Timely Communication.
Truth is safe in good therapy. Therapy creates a space that invites, expects, and is quite purposely designed for frank, probing, and revealing dialogue. It’s a safe space for you to express yourselves honestly, get to understand your true feelings and work with the therapist to figure out how to use that information in your journey toward healing.
5. Good Therapy Makes A Good Therapeutic Alliance
There should always be feelings of trust and respect between the participants and the therapist; a therapeutic alliance. If a therapist looks good on paper – with a wealth of experience, well trained etc but upon meeting them (within the first few sessions) you feel no chemistry, no trust, no warmth, then it’s probably best (for both of you) if you move on.
6. Good Therapy Encourages Your independence & Competence
If the therapy process is not moving in the direction of improving your resilience, independence, decision-making, and life competence, then therapy is not taking place. Therapy is not about handing out solutions to problems; it’s about teaching you how to solve your own problem.
7. Good Therapy Considers Your History & Biography
Good therapy makes room for biography. The past is not the only key, but is often one key to the present. We may not focus on it, but acknowledge it we must. A person’s biography provides a map of their experiential field; it’s a context within which their behaviour can be usefully understood. The past may not determine the present, but it certainly informs it. And it informs good therapy.
8. Good Therapy Takes Into Account Your Subjective Experience & Inner World.
Good therapists know that to understand you, they must understand your subjective experience. Good therapy is curious about your inner grammar. Good therapy honours, maps, and works within your subjective experience. In other words, good therapy accepts that while, for example, your mother is in all likelihood an average person by objective measurements, she is special to you, because of how she is represented in your subjective world.
9. Good Therapy Happens When You Do The Work
The effort you put in such as hope, motivation, resources, social support, and grit account for far more than the therapist’s ability and characteristics in determining the therapy’s outcome. Your experience of the therapy also matters more than the objective measurement of therapy ingredients. All therapy, in a fundamental sense, is self-therapy. If therapy is to work for you, you have to make it work for the therapy.
10. Support, Learning & Action Facilitates
Good therapy engages you on multiple levels. It involves your emotions, cognition, and behaviour. Often, the effort in therapy will focus first on an emphatic understanding of you, establishing alliance and becoming aware of your inner architecture, life circumstances, and personal narrative. Then, good therapy will also facilitate learning, new insights, new ways of thinking, of communicating with others and managing emotion. Finally, good therapy includes a focus on your action in the world—practising new skills, adopting new habits, and new ways of moving in the world.
If you are in therapy feeling alone and unsupported, if you haven’t learned anything new, and if your behaviour has not changed at all, then you’re not in therapy, at least not in therapy that’s any good.
