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The Importance of Future-Oriented
Therapy
Unless you have a compelling vision of the
future, life is just a series of nows. And when now is not so good,
depression is nearly inevitable. Now that you have found THE ROAD™
you can be free of depression.
The key point is that you want things to be
different, now. You want to know that your future holds positive
possibilities, and that is not going to be more of what is and has
been painful. But unless you develop the skills to think about the
future realistically, and have a specific plan for actively creating
the means to change possibilities to realities, you can get stuck in
the "one-day-at-a-time" philosophy.
Depressed clients who come to THE ROAD™ for
counselling and psychotherapy often
seem to have little or no sense of purpose or meaning. Consequently,
they have no future that compels them, no goals that pull them
along. Their day-to-day routine is their whole life, rather than
just a part of it.
Since a cornerstone of depression is the
inability to develop a more positive future by focusing excessively
on the negative past, it is inadvisable, perhaps even harmful, for
anyone to immerse you in even more of the past.
Therapists who say, "Let's continue to talk
about your childhood" session after session are doing you a
disservice. An over emphasis on the past limits, and may even
prevent, the development of a positive orientation towards the
future. When you're depressed, you already know how to focus on the
hurts of now or of your past.
How to build a future that is more satisfying
and beneficial is the more relevant task at hand. Thus, at THE ROAD™
we move away from the conventional wisdom that suggests that therapy
must invariably focus upon your past.
It is not coincidental that the
psychotherapies, like Time Line Therapy®,
which have proven themselves to be the most powerful and consistent
in the treatment of depression not only de-emphasize the past, but
actively encourage setting realistic goals - establishing a future
orientation - and expending consistent effort in the direction of
reaching those goals.