Dear Readers,

In our previous issues of Mind, Body & Soul, we’ve tackled the issue of how to get started on the path to getting help for issues of mental health. We’ve also examined the concept of being willing to be fully engaged in the therapeutic process in order to make the most of the help you are getting. And although we touched on the issue of ascertaining whether the help you’ve gone for is actually helping you, I’d like to turn more specifically to this topic in the introduction to this issue.

I recently attended a training on the MindfulChoice® Process, an original, innovative methodology to help organizations and individuals achieve professional success and personal satisfaction in our increasingly challenging society, developed by Dr. Robert Lebovits, PhD. and Dr. Gerard Meyers, PhD. While there are actually 14 paradigms that they use in their methodology, the one in particular that I’d like to discuss is the concept of Destination versus Journey.

In previous issues, I touched on the concept of setting a goal for your therapy and checking to see whether you felt that the therapy you were in, with a particular therapist, was helping you to achieve that goal. I’d like to expand on that using the concept of Destination versus Journey. When thinking about your treatment goals, many people get caught up in the more immediate goals, the short-term goals that they can only seem to focus on because they are in so much psychic or emotional pain, that they are only able to focus on the immediate problems. This is only natural when we are hurting and seeking relief. The problem is that when we don’t have an ultimate destination in mind, we may make decisions or go in a direction that makes sense in the moment, but which we would never choose if we were keeping our long-term goal in mind.

Take Joseph as an example. Joseph came in to therapy because he didn’t know what to do about the relationship he was in with Susan. Joseph was ready to be serious with her, but Susan wasn’t ready to be serious, period. She wasn’t sure when or if she would ever be. This was killing Joseph. He was totally committed to Susan, felt she had all the qualities he was looking for, and although he had dated a lot, didn’t feel like he had ever had such a strong relationship with anyone. Joseph’s family – who didn’t know about his relationship with Susan, because she wasn’t ready to be serious and therefore didn’t want to interact with them and have everyone start to make assumptions – had been pressuring him to go out on dates, suggesting girls and trying to set him up. Although he knew his heart wasn’t in it, occasionally he would go to relieve the pressure on the home front. So now, after a year of seeing but not seeing Susan, he couldn’t take the disconnect. He wanted to know what he should do: Should he keep things the way they are, just so he could still be with her? Should he stay friends, but resolve to pay more attention on the dates he is set up with? Was there something to say to Susan to change her mind? Could he hope that if he hung in there long enough, she would eventually want to get married? And if that happened, could he count on it being him that she would want to marry?

Joseph’s questions were almost endless, and it followed that the possible directions he could take to think about his problem were of equal number. Refocusing him, as I’d heard at the training, I asked, “What do you want your destination to be, Joseph? Meaning, if you can’t do anything about what Susan will or won’t do, and you can’t change her, if you are in therapy to work on you, which is the only person you can work on in therapy, where do you want to get to through this process?” This seemed to radically shift things for Joseph. He stopped focusing on Susan and what he could do about her, and finally settled on the core component of therapy, which is that it can only ever be about the person who is there. This is not to say that there can’t be change for the positive in those around us and in our relationships, but the only person you can have goals for specifically is you, the person who is there. Even in couples therapy, each person can set goals for the couplehood, and they can each set goals for themselves and how they want to participate in the marriage, but one can’t set goals for the other if that goal isn’t one shared by the person himself.

The other, more specifically moving, aspect of this for Joseph was how all of his questions about where to go and what steps to take on his journey became so much clearer once he could reflect them against his ultimate goal. Once he said, “I want to have a committed relationship with someone who feels about me the way I feel about them,” specific questions (denoting possible steps on his journey) about Susan weren’t questions anymore – because she was not an equal in this relationship (giving and feeling about him the way he felt about her and the relationship).

Keeping your ultimate destination in mind doesn’t magically get you there. In fact, most issues that people go to therapy for take a lot of hard work. However, evaluating whether or not you are on the right road can better be done by asking yourself: “Where do I want to end up and who do I want to be?” And then, at each crossroads, juncture or time of confusion about which way to head, re-ask yourself and evaluate your options in relation to your ultimate destination.