How to Figure Out Your Goals for Therapy

Therapy is a time commitment and a financial investment. You deserve to get what you want & need out of it. This can be hard when you’re unclear about what your goals are in the first place. In this post I’ll describe a strategy for determining your therapy goals so you can have a clear picture of what you’d like to accomplish.

While you might already know what you don’t want in life (to feel depressed every day, for example), it can be helpful to identify what you do want. Our core values are the beliefs and ideals that are most meaningful to us in our lives. When we have clarity around our values, we have a sense of direction and purpose that can guide us through life. Identifying our core values can help us create tangible goals for therapy.

To determine your values, you can find a generic list of values online, purchase a deck of values cards/make your own, or use a free online values sorter like this: https://www.truupsychology.com/values. As you sort through the values, begin by eliminating the ones that you don’t relate to or that don’t hold significance in your life. Then, go through the cards/list again, and eliminate values that are not of highest importance to you. Continue to do this process until you’re left with 3 to 5 values. These are your core values. Try not to get hung up on what the different values mean. What’s most important is what they mean to you. Remind yourself that eliminating a value doesn’t mean it’s not important to you. It just means that others are even more important or that one value encompasses several others (‘connection’ might capture ‘family’, ‘friends’ and ‘nature’, for example).

Once you’ve identified your core values, the next step is to identify ways you would like to live out those values in your life and the ways you already do. You might do this in your journal. Let’s say ‘creativity’ is one of your core values. What are concrete ways you connect with creativity in your life? List as many as you can. What are concrete ways you would like to connect even more with creativity? List those too.

The next question to ponder in your journal is this: What stands in the way of connecting with each of your core values in the ways you listed? This will be the stuff you address in therapy. If your value is creativity, what gets in the way of expressing yourself creatively in the ways you’d like to? If it’s that you’re self-critical, your goal might be addressing self-criticalness so that you can freely create/express yourself. Most people have one or several goals for therapy. You might end up with a goal based on each of your core values, or you might come up with one or two goals that encompasses all of your core values.

In addition to directly asking your therapist/a potential therapist how their approach can help you meet your goals, it could be helpful to do your own research on therapeutic modalities. Most therapists tend to be pretty eclectic and combine a number of modalities and techniques. However, if a therapist lists any modalities on their website, these are probably the ones they are most drawn to. Search [therapist’s modality] + theory of change. Every modality has a theory of change, or, a theory behind how that modality helps create change in a person’s life.

I googled ‘CBT theory of change’ and found that in CBT (a popular modality), change occurs when a person recognizes their negative thoughts and replaces them with healthier alternative thoughts. A CBT therapist might guide you to notice the negative thoughts that come up when you are creatively engaged, help you challenge those thoughts, and then replace them with thoughts that support your creativity.

The modalities I am most drawn to are depth psychotherapy and gestalt therapy, and I feel that their theories of change go hand-in-hand:

Gestalt therapy employs what is called the ‘paradoxical theory of change,’ which is that change occurs spontaneously as a person becomes more of who they are (and stops trying to become someone/something that they are not). According to the theory behind depth psychotherapy, change (healing) occurs when we become aware of and integrate aspects of ourselves that we ignore, repress, or have not yet explored.

See how the modalities you learn about resonate with you and how they might translate to your particular goals.