What Makes a Therapy, Therapy? Use These 4 Ingredients to Make Anything Therapeutic
Paul W. Anderson, PhD, licensed psychologist, is a marriage counselor you can trust to be attentive, compassionate, and equipped with effective strategies that will help you and your partner put joy and happiness back in your relationship. Marriage and relationships struggle to function well with quality under modern stress... more
What makes a therapy, therapy? Use these 4 ingredients to make anything therapeutic.
When is therapy therapeutic? We have an abundance of therapies available to us. The list of therapies grows every day. It's as if you can put the word “therapy” after any human activity and you have invented another form of therapy.
There's cooking therapy, horse (equine) therapy, art therapy, music therapy, play therapy, marriage therapy… get my point? How about yard work therapy, dishwashing therapy, floor-mopping therapy, camping therapy? Don’t forget psychotherapy. Come one, come all. There are many forms of therapy.
Calling All Therapies including Lifestyle Therapy
By that I mean use whatever you can for a therapeutic benefit. And how does that happen? If you apply the following four principles to any human activity you will receive therapeutic benefit from that.
The 4 Therapeutic Principles That Make Any Human Activity a Therapy
- Slow down and focus on what you're doing.
- Show up. Live only in the moment you have helped to create. Ignore all and any distractions including things from the past or anticipations into the future. Stay with what is going on in this “now,” nothing else.
- Observe, don't judge. Partner with the activity. Give up the need to control outcomes. Be curious, watch what happens when___________. Suspend evaluation or editing.
- Apply mindfulness as you understand it. Breathe with the energy of the thing you are calling therapy.
The Benefits of Therapy
Anxiety management is a major return or benefit from doing therapy of any sort. If you are calmer, more at peace, and comforted, the problem-solving part of you works much better. Your ability to read and relate to factual reality goes way up. With less anxiety, you think more clearly, see more options for solutions in your life, find what works best for you and your self-care, and make fewer bad calls. In turn, you feel better.
Another gain from doing therapy is that you get better at it: a better cook, a better woodworker or potter or floor scrubber. Do relationship therapy and you improve how you do relationships. The better you can do something, the better you feel about yourself.
Get Rid of the “Fix it, Forget it” Mentality. It’s Maintenance
As with food and air, you never get enough. Food in, empty out. Breath in, breath out. And repeat again, and again. The challenge is not to fix hunger or asphyxiation. Rather, we use maintenance programs to keep life going and deprivation at bay.
Lifestyle Therapy
Build therapeutic experiences into your life as regular events because it's important to stay calm, focused, and mindful of what you’re doing and the choices you're making at all times.
Keep adding therapies to your life and eventually, you will have built a therapeutic lifestyle. Let’s call it Lifestyle Therapy.
What is lifestyle therapy? Let's turn it around and ask the better question: how can a lifestyle be therapeutic?
The phrase “lifestyle” refers to how a person lives. It includes everything they do, the physical aspects, emotional, intellectual, recreational, spiritual, and social dimensions of their life. It's the way of life that you follow. It refers to the way you think about the world, what it means to be a good person, what the good life looks like. It encompasses all of the influences that work on a person in a given culture, place, and time.
A therapeutic lifestyle is one that first of all adheres to the therapeutic principles listed above. But it goes further and requires an activity many people they're not inclined to do. to make your lifestyle therapeutic you must start with a well-examined life. That requires a willingness to put energy into paying attention to your life in general. There are questions that must be answered and these are not always comfortable to reckon with.
- Who or what controls my life and why would I say that?
- What's the purpose of life in general, mine in particular?
- What are the indications that I've been successful in any or all areas of my life?
- How do I decide how to spend my resources including time and money?
- Do I understand what it takes to take good care of myself in all dimensions of my life?
- How do I know what is good for me and what isn't?
- Do I have healthy boundaries with other people?
- Do I know what a healthy boundary looks like?
When a person is willing to contemplate these questions and give them honest answers that are realistic for them, that's a step in the right direction of living a therapeutic lifestyle.
Lifestyle therapy is constantly curious and open to new ideas about how to better one's life and the lives of those around them. Education and listening to what others have learned is an ongoing enterprise in a therapeutic lifestyle.
Lifestyle therapy urges a person to examine their motives. “Why am I doing this? Does what I'm doing fall in line with what I have learned is good for me? Is my motive consistent with my values and ethics?”
Lifestyle therapy has a high degree of integrity to it. It minimizes hypocrisies and inconsistencies and when those are pointed out they are examined and accepted as part of the messiness of life we live with.
Forgiveness of self, tolerance of self, and the willingness to keep learning and growing is applied first to self and then to others. Acceptance replaces judgment, first with self and then towards others.
This may seem like an awful lot of work, so much so that there's no therapeutic value or benefit to this lifestyle. The work is not living the lifestyle. The work is shifting to this lifestyle in the first place. Once this becomes a person’s normal way of life, living it feeds on itself to the point where not only does it add benefit, but it creates energy of its own. But I agree. Getting there is not easy.
Making significant changes in the patterns by which a person lives, how they think, how they manage their feelings, and how they relate to others is easier with the help of a guide, a coach, a therapist, or a lifestyle mentor.
Find someone you trust. Engage them for at least six months because that's how long it usually takes to break up old habits and establish new ones. Tell this person you want them to companion you as you change course and learn how to maximize Lifestyle Therapy at:
