A.M.A.A. - Ask Moonface Anything, Again

[Moonface]

You're fine for asking, I'm not fussed about sharing. XD

Generally my therapy sessions are that if I have something to talk about at that moment that's important, then that comes first. Since my therapy is for anxiety/depression, I'll be asked how my week was and what's better/different and if everything is good, then that is just viewed as I had a good week without a problem and so we move straight on to continuing with the stuff we're working on, which for me is things such as CBT and changing the way I view things or techniques to keep my anxiety low and how to approach things such as if someone has upset me, rather than accuse them and make them become defensive as a result, instead you use this thing called BIFF which keeps the entire thing as neutral as possible.

If however I said my week was bad, then we cover that instead so we can address what was wrong, what I can do in future, or how I can feel better about it. For example when we had to put down Shira's cat, that rocked me hard and my therapist spent an entire session just helping me get through that and put all of the other stuff to the side.

When it comes to goals, it's just an end goal for me. Everything leading up to it could be viewed as small goals, but those goals are more learning different things that collectively make up the end goal. If I were to use smoking as an example, then the way my therapy works is I wouldn't set a goal of "Don't have x amount of cigarettes this week" but just have an end goal of "Stop smoking", and each week would be working on things that help me avoid cravings or something that assist in getting the number of cigarettes I smoke down. Equated to my therapy, that's getting the number of anxiety/depression episodes down.

However, this is for my therapist. Shira has a therapist too, and hers is different to mine because my therapy is for CBT, and Shira's is not. I've had two sessions with her therapist, and in those sessions it started out with us both being asked what we think can be done to improve our environment (the house), and write those down. We'd then share our lists to see where we both saw a problem and where person A saw a problem that may not have been seen by person B. Then it went into coming up with a plan to deal with one problem, which for us was to tidy the dining room, and then that gradually will increase to more rooms, more tasks, etc. So for that, there's more concrete goals but it still fits the similar mold of small goals that collectively make up the end goal.

Onto how often you go, that is never determined by you but by the therapist. If it's really bad, you could be asked to do twice a week, but generally it seems to be once a week is the starting point, and then as you progress your therapist will propose going to biweekly, and then monthly, etc.

For cost, hard to say because everywhere is going to be different but my therapist charges $85 with no insurance, and the person Shira and I see who determines our medication charges $75 with no insurance. I don't know what Shira's therapist charges though.