What Is Supportive Therapy? - How Does It Help & Things to Consider

Mental illness is a challenging issue of everyday life in the present world. Moreover, people are also very concerned about their mental health nowadays. Therefore, it is always helpful to take help from professionals and opt for expert treatment for better mental health. Supportive therapy is one of those effective treatments that can greatly help suffering people. 

Keep reading the article to learn about the benefits of supportive therapies.

Supportive therapy is a very beneficial form of psychotherapy that treats people based on a therapeutic alliance to reduce the issues of low self-esteem, control negative thinking, regulate impulses, and restore connection with reality. 

The therapy helps people to control their everyday problems with compassion, comfort, and empathy. The therapist will help you in the following ways through this treatment:

• Control your symptoms.
• Give more attention than the conventional therapies.
• Reduce the episodes of panic and anxiety attack.
• Help to handle emotional challenges.

Supportive psychotherapy is a form of psychoanalysis that help people with different cognitive impairments, low self-esteem, adaptive skills, and ego issues. Therefore, people who face the following situations may opt for this therapy:

• Challenging life events.
• Stressful circumstances.
• Lower IQ.
• Problems in learning.
• Losing connection with reality.
• Personality disorders.

Supportive therapy is done properly with certain techniques. These are as follows:

• Skill Enhancement

Supportive therapy helps people by equipping them with different skill-enhancing tools and guidance. Therefore, they feel confident in handling life events in the outside world. Further, these tools help maximize adaptive capacity and handle challenging situations.

• Anxiety Prevention

Anxiety is a common problem for everyone nowadays. Stressful lifestyles cause increased anxiety levels which further hampers physical and mental health. Therapists will help to reduce anxiety-causing feelings by normalizing the thought process. Therefore, the therapy works on reducing anxiety to retain productivity in daily life.

• Alliance Enhancement

Therapists try to build an alliance among the clients with a more casual and conversational tone. They further keep aside the technical side of the treatment with collaborative discussions that help to include empathy in people’s daily lives. This technique helps to make patients more comfortable with therapists, so the procedure becomes more effective.

• Strengthening Self-Esteem

Fortifying self-esteem is an important part of supportive therapy. Therapists improve patients’ self-esteem by normalizing their thoughts and encouraging these. Therefore, the patients become more confident in their daily lives.

• Increasing Awareness

Professionals help to increase awareness among their clients through proper interpretation and clarification. Further, therapists also ask their patients to confront their inner selves and wish to become more self-aware. This is a very important technique of supportive psychotherapy because it boosts self-confidence.

Supportive therapy helps treat disruption in mental and cognitive functions. These disruptions can be caused by several mental ailments. Supportive psychotherapy helps to reduce the symptoms of these ailments. The common situations requiring supportive interventions are: 

• Anxiety Disorder

People who face frequent restlessness due to stressful life events or other deep and sad situations can opt for supportive therapy. In this therapy, experts help the patients deal with their anxiety issues by discussing stressful events and reducing their severity.

• Disordered Thinking

Disorder in thinking patterns causes different issues in daily activities. For example, you may feel detached from reality and face problems while working. Supportive psychotherapists help you focus more on yourself and properly handle your thoughts.

• Depression

Depression is a another common mental health issue nowadays. People suffer from this condition irrespective of their age. Supportive psychotherapists are very helpful in reducing depression by normalizing adverse situations in your life.

• Relationship Problems

Relationship issues are very prevalent, leading to anxiety and depression. People of different age groups face relationship issues. As supportive psychotherapists treat patients by conversing with them, they can bring out the actual reasons for the relationship issues and help them overcome these.

• Disorganized Behaviour

Disorganized behaviour due to cognitive impairment or disturbing life situations is treated by supportive psychotherapy. Therapists find out the causes of this issue and reduce the occurrence of it.

• Personality Disorders

Personality disorder or borderline personality disorder may occur due to unfinished or wrong treatment for mental disorders. Supportive psychotherapy helps to boost self-awareness and thus works on reducing the severity of the symptoms of personality disorders.

• Emotional Regulation

Impulses can sometimes be uncontrollable, which may lead to different complications. Impulse control disorder is not only self-destructive but also harmful to the people around you. Supportive psychotherapy helps control your emotions and impulses to overcome serious behavioural issues.

The benefits of supportive psychotherapy are listed below:

• Supportive psychotherapy is effective in boosting self-esteem.
• This therapy is beneficial for treating behavioural disorders. 
• This therapy is helpful for finding out one’s limitations.
• Increases the capacity to accept and love the world outside.
• Removes the sense of meaningless guilt.
• Increases self-confidence to handle any difficult situation.
• Helps children to set their goals and be more self-aware.

Supportive therapy is a part of psychotherapy that is quite basic yet very effective. Studies show that the therapy efficiently treats challenging impulsive situations. As this therapy works with a therapeutic alliance, it is recognized as a successful mode of psychotherapy. Further, it is also effective because it is a more conversation-based therapy which keeps the patient at ease during the session.

Any type of psychotherapy covers rapport-building in the first few sessions, while supportive psychotherapy conducts rapport-building throughout the session. Further, as the session is non-directive, therapists generally depend on the client’s ability to structure the session. However, the main objective of this therapy is to create a therapeutic alliance which is stated in the following steps: 

Step 1: Building a bond between therapist and client.

Step 2: Making of agreement regarding the works and goals of the treatment.

Step 3: Checking clients’ capacity to take the therapy.

Step 4: Active involvement of the therapists with the problems of the patient.

Supportive psychotherapy does not have any time limit. It is usually an add-on to other types of therapy and can extend for long or short-term. Generally, it depends on how long a patient needs to recover from the adverse mental condition. Further, it also depends on how long a patient needs to connect with the therapist.

In supportive therapy, a client agrees with the therapist’s designated tasks and goals. Therefore, the clients must be fully involved in the therapy process, depending on their willingness. Further, in this process, they may get some homework that should be done to get the best results.

Hence, before choosing a supportive psychotherapist, one should consider the following things:

• The empathetic character of the therapist.
• Non-directive behaviour of the therapist.
• The expertise of the therapist.

Supportive therapy is an effective solution for people who suffer from different mental ailments. It is, however, associated with several other advanced therapies, but its non-technical approach has made it more popular in creating empathy among patients. In addition, the treatment effectively finds the root cause of mental illness and helps to reduce it naturally.