Individual psychotherapy has been operationalized as any intervention designed to alter attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and actions of a person who has sought or been brought to treatment with distress and/or maladaptive behaviour. The collaborative process of individual psychotherapy involves a change in the manner of one’s experience through talk therapy that embrace the guidance of an individual to confront what has brought them to therapy, expressing and normalising the feelings associated with their experience, altering of maladaptive attributions of meaning, and gaining practical and mental mastery while facilitating the integration of the self. Such a collaborative therapeutic process assumes that at least one of the parties has the intent of promoting the growth, development, maturity, improved functioning, and enhanced coping with life’s demands and others. It is important to note that psychotherapy in itself does not provide the motivation for such development or growth. It is assumed to be inherent in the person seeking treatment. Psychotherapy however does play an integral part in releasing and facilitating the tendency of a person to pursue psychological development or maturity, especially when this tendency has been blocked.
By engaging in collaborative process that relies upon the client for direction in the process, Hannes would like to invite you on a journey of exploration. The objective of this trip, the goal of the search, is to try to learn something of the process of psychotherapy or the process by which behaviour and personality change takes place. It serves as an opportunity that offers exciting possibilities for the cultivation of a creative, adaptive, and autonomous person.