There comes a time in life when you feel the need to work on yourself. This willingness to start feeling’ better can be motivated by different reasons.
You can have some symptoms such as depressive thoughts, anxiety, difficulties in your love life or simply having the wish to understand oneself better, to increase your self-awareness in order to improve your life and reaching your best potential.
Finding the right psychologist in Brussels who will assist you in this key moment of your life, is mandatory. This is an important step and its therefore very important to do some preliminary research to find the right fit for you.
In Brussels, the mental health landscape is very diverse, combining practitioners from different school of thoughts and also various nationalities. As a matter of fact, some people will prefer a psychologist who will speak their mother tongue, some who are bilingual will care less.
The first important point that should be discussed here, is the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist.
A psychiatrist is a doctor who went to medical school and then did a specialization in psychiatry. He studied the different mental health disorders and their treatments, mainly in term of pharmacology. A psychiatrist will most of the time prescribes medicine as the main solution to cure the symptoms.
A psychologist studied psychology which is the science of behavior and mind, and then specialized in one of the principal psychology field. However, to work in one to one session, a psychologist should be specialized in clinical psychology. Then the psychologist should be specialized in psychotherapy. This last point is very important as otherwise, the psychologist will not be able to conduct the treatment following a consistent pattern.
The three main school of thoughts in psychotherapy are the psychodynamic approach, the cognitive behavioral approach and the systemic approach. Others school of thoughts have emerged with different appellations in the psychotherapy landscape, but they are generally inspired by one of the major school of thoughts or combined different perspective and present themselves as “integrative”.
The psychodynamic approach emphasizes systematic study of the psychological forces that underly human behavior, feelings and emotions and how they might relate to early experience. Working on the past to better understand the present problem and the symptom construction is the main focus of this approach, this approach works with the unconscious.
The cognitive behavioral approach is a short-term psychotherapy which is addressing the symptoms as a pattern of cognitions that needs to be changed by a different pattern in order to change the negative feeling behind it. It doesn’t address the past.
The systemic approach seeks to address people not only on an individual level but mainly as people in relationships, dealing with the interactions of groups and their interactional patterns and dynamics. In conclusion, finding the right psychologist in Brussels is an important process that requires some preliminary research in order to find which approach is best for you and your specific needs. However, the most important prerequisite is finding someone with whom you feel comfortable and who you can trust. A psychotherapy is an encounter, it’s a process that has the power, with the help of the right therapist, to increase considerably your self-awareness, and will allow to better discover oneself to live a deep fulfilling life.
