Beyond Coping Skills: How Insight-Oriented Therapy Helps You Find Meaning
If you are navigating, or have previously navigated, a mental health issue, you might be familiar with this situation. You’ve heard all the typical advice: get enough sleep, do some deep breathing, wash your face, eat some food, and take your meds. You’ve been doing the work and showing up to your appointments. You’ve been practicing your coping strategies. You’re familiar with who to call if you’re in crisis. You feel like you’re doing all the right things–and yet, it still doesn't feel like it’s enough.
If this sounds like you, you’re not alone.
This is where I once was. I had begun going to therapy to treat specific mental health symptoms and once I had developed robust coping strategies and learned more about how to manage my emotions, I felt a bit lost. I wanted to work on “more” but I didn’t know what “more” looked like. I could now go to bed on time, but didn’t really feel like I had found a reason to hop out of bed in the morning. Health wise, I was doing well, and yet it felt like something was missing.
When our most immediate symptoms begin to fade, the opportunity for deeper work begins. Life is more than the coping strategies and routines we use to stay well. It’s also about finding a reason to stay well. We all need a “why.” And sometimes that can get a little lost in our mental health system which is often focused on “What’s wrong?” over “What would make for a meaningful life?”
The world of psychotherapy can be confusing. While there are many forms of psychotherapy, they can be found on a spectrum of supportive, skills-based therapies on one end, and exploratory, insight-oriented therapies on the other. Skills-based therapies like Dialectical Behavioural Therapy and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy focus on developing practical strategies to deal with distressing thoughts and emotions. On the other hand, insight-oriented therapies such as psychodynamic therapy, Internal Family Systems, and existential therapy focus on building insight into your past and how it might shape your future. They also tend to be more process-driven, focusing on what’s happening in the relationship between the client and therapist.
How to Set Therapy Goals Beyond Symptom Relief
One of the hardest questions for people seeking therapy to answer is “What do you want to work on?”
When it comes to distressing symptoms, it can be easier to identify a goal. When we are anxious, we want to feel less anxious. When our mood is low, we want to feel happier. And when it comes to symptom-reduction, it can also be easier to find concrete solutions. As therapists, we have loads of resources devoted to helping you decrease your anxiety, improve your mood, cope with crisis, and get to sleep earlier.
But what about what comes next? When we feel better, we might start questioning who we are without our symptoms. When we feel better, we might start looking at areas of our life that we were unable to when we were in crisis. We might start wondering what else we want out of life. While this can be uncomfortable, it can help us identify what we desire: love, closeness, belonging, meaning, autonomy. And in that process, we might start to confront those things we cannot have: a life without limits, suffering, consequences or loss. Part of the work is grieving those things we realize we cannot have, which frees us to work towards what we can.
Existential Therapy: Understanding Life’s Core Challenges
There is an entire world beyond symptom-reduction. Being a person is hard. Human life is difficult. The existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom suggests that there are four existential “givens” that we must confront in our lives.
Isolation: While we have the capacity to form enduring relationships with other people, there is also an inherent separateness. No one can experience our lives for us and no one can know exactly what it is like to be us.
Death: No matter what we do, we cannot escape the fact that our lives (and the lives of the people we love) here on earth are limited.
Meaninglessness: Life has no inherent meaning. It is up to us to decide what meaning we find–which can be found through many different forms of religious and spiritual practice
Freedom: We are responsible for our own lives and choices. This responsibility is uncomfortable and we often do things to disown our own choices.
These existential givens pose important questions for our lives. We cannot get rid of them because they are immutable characteristics of human life. It’s no wonder that it’s difficult to determine what we want out of therapy.
How Therapy Can Help You Find Meaning, Not Just Relief
I didn’t know I wanted to be a therapist when I first sought out therapy. I didn’t know anything about the different modalities which I am familiar with today. I knew I had begun to dislike worksheets. I knew that some of my thinking patterns weren’t helpful. It wasn’t until I found a therapist who was willing to explore some of life’s tougher questions with me that therapy had begun to “click.”
Now, as a therapist, I like to combine skills and insight-based work. Sometimes we do need tangible solutions. Sometimes we need help learning how to “do the thing”. For instance, I’m often asked “How do I say no to this person (without feeling guilty)?” In that case, it might be helpful to discuss strategies about what exactly to say to this person next time an unwanted request comes up. Concurrently, it may also be helpful to explore where this underlying guilt may be coming from. What other areas does this show up? What do we feel like we owe others? What big existential fear might we have to face if we start saying no more often? Perhaps it’s isolation? If I don’t do what they want, they will go away and I will be alone.
Therapy can support you in not only managing difficult symptoms, but exploring deeper questions about who you are and where you may want to go from here. An insight-oriented therapist is not trying to give you the answers. They are trying to support you in uncovering your own answers–your own deeply held truths about who you are and how you want your life to be. Through this process of uncovering, in combination with developing new skills that support the life we want to live, we can begin to relate to others without losing ourselves. Rather than avoiding what we are afraid of, we can move towards what matters most to us.
Insight-Oriented Therapy vs CBT and DBT: What’s the Difference?
Insight-oriented: Generally longer term, open-ended, exploratory, relational, process-driven
Skills-based: Generally shorter-term, goal oriented, solution-focused, skills-driven
People often come to therapy not knowing what they want to work on, or their goals shift overtime. That’s okay. Most of our deepest desires are hard to express and even harder to measure. Our desire for belonging, safety, meaning, and transcendence can be difficult to put into words. Finding a therapist who practices an insight-oriented approach may support you in finding your own answers to life’s toughest questions.
As I continue this work, I feel deeply grateful to support individuals as they explore not only how to cope, but how to live with greater meaning, clarity, and self-understanding. I currently offer in-person individual counselling in London, Ontario, as well as virtual therapy across Ontario. Whether you’re navigating life beyond symptom relief, exploring deeper patterns, or simply feeling that something is missing, therapy can be a space to gently uncover what matters most to you. If this resonates, I would be glad to connect.