About psychotherapy

Very often people seek for informal psychological help such as consolation, advice and the like and find it with their family members or close friends. Sometimes casual acquaintance or even strange people who are good listeners can be another source of moral support. Such form of help plays a very important role in recovering. But professional psychotherapy differs from informal support having two essentially positive moments. Firstly, psychotherapists are specially trained for such activity. Secondly, psychotherapists activity is based on specially worked out theory which explains the reasons of patients' mental sufferings and describes methods of solving the conflicts.

The aim of all kinds and methods of psychotherapy is to give a person possibility to satisfy all his normal needs for love and understanding, to help him to correct disadaptive relationship, emotions and behaviour — everything that prevents a person from reaching or satisfying these needs. Obtaining it psychotherapy helps the patient to improve his social interaction, relieve the distress and at the same time it also helps him to take suffering as inevitable life aspect

For your information!

• short — term (to 5 seances);
• medium — term (from 5 to 15 seances);
• long — term (from 15 seances and more).

• problem-oriented — aimed at removal of definite problem;
• personally-oriented — aimed at studying, correction, and revival of personality.

• individual;
• family;
• group;
• collective.

• gestalt therapy;
• NLP;
• psychodrama;
• bodily-oriented transpersonal therapy;
• psychoanalysis.

Psychotherapy of dependence

Using psychoactive substances (PAS further) is not adequate way of solving vital problems. Frequently, just at the beginning, this process can be regarded as autotherapy. Such factors as anxiety, inclination to depression, obsessive fear for social contacts, etc. have definite ethyological meaning. In time the use of PAS becomes compulsive (forced, irresistible) and leads to progressive worsening of all vital spheres. Compulsive abuse of narcotic substances is dependence which can be defined as disease and which effect the patient physically, mentally and intellectually.

Primary aim of psychotherapy is to help the patient to obtain and preserve abstinence from using PAS and from dependant behaviour. The second aim is to help the patient to cope with psychic disorders and with social life abnormalities which developed as the result of the patient's disease — chemicals addiction.

The first task for the therapeutist to decide is to help the patient to become aware of the problem, to take this problem and connected with it irrationality of thinking. It should be noted that in contrast to alcohol addicts who vigorously and flatly object that they have addiction to alcohol, drug addicts easily admit that they are addicts. But it doesn't mean that there's no negation of the problem at all. It is expressed in another form. As a rule the patients admit their physical addiction but reject psychological addiction. In practice it is expressed in the following way: the patient agrees to take a course of treatment to remove symptoms of acute abstinence syndrome but as for the psychological dependence he is sure he is equal to the problem. Indeed, acute abstinence syndrome symptoms require special attention and well-directed efforts. At the same time, experiments prove that it is very important from the very beginning to form in patients right understanding of the tasks set. The doctor's efforts should be directed at the patient to become aware of the fact that his disease reveals not only somatovegetative symptoms that appears as the reaction to drug withdrawal; and that his main problem is striving for taking drugs. This striving doesn't disappear after removing of acute abstinence syndrome, on the contrary, it remains for unlimitedly long time unconsciously inducing the addict to relapse. Then the patient is encouraged to obtaining and keeping abstinence, to developing psychosocial skills that in future help to manage without drugs, to intellectual development. The patient is made to understand that recovery is a permanent process that lasts all life long, and in it the patient is the main acting agent of the changes. It is he himself who must be responsible for recovery work and recovery success.