Setting Therapy Goals: Guidance for Starting Therapy in the New Year

The beginning of the year is a common time for folks to start therapy for the first time. For those already in therapy, it can be a good time to review your progress and reset your therapy goals. Here are some tips on how to set realistic therapy goals.

Therapy Goals: Why are they needed?

Having goals in therapy can be helpful for many reasons. In general, it’s helpful to clarify what you want to improve, change, or heal. I’ll give examples further down in the article, but it’s important to have a general sense of why you are in therapy. Your goals do not need to be fancy or even that specific.  It’s totally fine if you’re in therapy because you benefit from having someone to talk through your week with. That’s a perfectly good goal and focus to have! But make sure you are clear with yourself (and with your therapist) about it.

Understanding why you’re there will help you evaluate if the therapy direction is meeting your needs, and if the therapist is a good fit for you. If you want to primarily process childhood experiences, then having a therapist that’s focused on OCD treatment may not be the right fit (obviously)!  

It’s okay if you don’t have goals determined before you start meeting with a new therapist. This is something you can do with the therapist in sessions, and often this can be helpful. So, it’s okay if your goals are set after you’ve already started! Every therapist should be able to work with you to assist in clarifying what you’d like to heal or change in your life.

I recommend talking about goals from the very beginning. Have a consult call or introductory call with a prospective therapist and talk about your goals. If you are having trouble setting therapy goals, then say that in the first phone call! Honestly, how the therapist responds will tell you a lot about what it’s like to work with that therapist and will give you good information on whether or not they’re a good fit.

So what is therapy actually good for?

Mainly, therapy helps you feel seen and understood. Therapy is great for increasing insight and self awareness, building self compassion and self acceptance, and learning new coping skills. It’s also good for processing traumas and emotions, and can be helpful to learn about emotions in general. Depending on the therapist and their training, therapy can also help you reconnect with your body or your spiritual side. You can practice boundary setting and other skills as well.

Setting unrealistic therapy goals will almost always lead to disappointment. Expecting your therapist to be the expert that will teach you everything you need to do to have a perfectly happy life- well, that’s unrealistic! But that’s a totally understandable thing to want from therapy! Just be aware if that’s what you’re looking for (and I would even suggest discussing this with your therapist).

How to set realistic goals

So let’s get real here. Your therapy goals are not always going to be realistic. Therapy is not going to entirely change your life and entirely change your relationships. I mean, therapy creates change and you’re going to learn new skills, have new outlooks and interpretations, and experience some degree of change for sure. But, therapy can take a long time to see effects. This is going to be different for everyone, and depends a lot on the issues you’re working on, your openness to change, goodness of fit between you and your therapist, and many many other factors.

Also, to be perfectly honest, your therapy journey may not change the other people in your life.  This means that you are unlikely to fix problems in your romantic relationship if you are coming to individual therapy by yourself. Absolutely things will change in your relationships as you change through therapy, but your individual therapist cannot change someone that’s not in the room. (I mean, therapists can’t change anyone really but you get what I mean). So if you are unhappy in your romantic relationship or your family system and you come to individual therapy by yourself, don’t expect your personal therapy to change anyone but yourself.

Let’s review some examples of therapy goals.

Some general therapy goals could be:

• I want to feel less anxious in my daily life.

• I want to feel more confident in my body.

• I want to better understand myself overall.

Some specific therapy goals could be:

• I want to feel less anxious at school.

• I want to feel more confident when dating, especially in regards to being physically intimate with someone new.

• I want to better understand how my early family experiences impact my present day experiences at work and in relationships.

Amending goals and resetting goals

It’s going to be normal for goals in therapy to shift as you progress in therapy. Sometimes this is due to genuine progress you’ve made, and sometimes this is because new things are uncovered in sessions. A good therapist will help you adapt your goals and will help make sense of what direction you’re headed in now. Your job as the client is to keep allowing yourself to open up in sessions. A therapist’s job is to see the bigger picture and to hold all the puzzle pieces together. So, let things change as your insight changes.

It’s always a good idea to check in with your therapist about where you feel you’re at with your goals, and appropriate to ask for feedback from them as well.  There tend to be natural times where review occurs, like the start of a new year, but you can check in whenever it feels right to you.

What to do if not feeling progress

If you’re feeling stuck, there’s probably a reason for it. Bring it up with your therapist and together you can explore what may be going on underneath the surface. Sometimes, clients encounter defense mechanisms they were unaware of. Sometimes therapists bump up against the extent of their knowledge or experience in that area. Sometimes things are indeed changing and improving, but it’s hard to see while you are still in it (this is where having the therapist’s perspective is helpful). Sometimes there are things you can do together that can get through a slump and sometimes genuinely taking a break from therapy or trying a different modality helps. There’s usually a reason, and I suggest approaching it with curiosity and compassion. There’s no shame with slumps! They often serve a purpose.

Therapy is an investment of time, energy, and money. You’re going to be best served by having a clear sense of what brings you to therapy while being open to changing goals as you experience change. Discuss your goals with your therapist right from the start to keep communication and expectations clear. Your therapist can assist in reality-checking goals and in keeping them realistic. Remember, therapy is a team effort- you and the therapist are here together working towards a shared vision. Talk about what is working and what is not working, and allow it to be a dialogue. Therapists can sometimes see change even when you can’t.

Good luck on your therapy journey!