Hey everyone. Welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hansen.

So today we have the first episode of what I'm going to be tentatively calling 10

Good Minutes. These are a short explainer type

episodes where I unpack a specific topic or an idea and I look into the research

behind it and share with you what I've learned. Given how much of the

podcast focuses on developing inner strengths and working through our

challenges in life and given also that Rick is a psychotherapist who spent 30 years or more in clinical practice,

I thought that it made sense to start this series by focusing on therapy,

and specifically trying to explore why therapy works.

Because if you think about it, psychotherapy is kind of weird.

Two people walk into a room, then they kind of do something together.

In traditional talk therapy, you might be familiar with the sort of stereotypical image of Freud with a patient on the couch, but in reality therapy takes a lot of different forms. So whatever the form of therapy we're talking about,

whether it's psychodynamic or you're doing something like CBT or you're doing somatic

experiencing or gestalt work or whatever, the two people work together for a while, they talk, they do whatever

they do, and then somehow through some process, one of them kind of ends up feeling better. So to answer the question of why therapy

works we need to start by kind of asking ourselves, wait does therapy work and

the overwhelming majority of studies that have been performed on this question have found that psychotherapy tends to help patients, and some have found that psychotherapy is as effective or even more effective for the treatment of depression as medication is. The pleasant benefit of therapy is that it also tends to avoid problematic side effects that can be associated with medication while having a lower relapse rate after treatment.

And if you're interested in where this information is coming from, it's based on a wide variety

of studies and I will be including as many of those studies as I can kind of

reasonably fit into the description of today's podcast in the description. So if

you're interested in learning more about the research behind this stuff check out

the description of today's

...