What is Proactive Therapy?

What is Proactive therapy?

There is a common misconception that therapy and counselling is reserved for people in active crisis. Whilst this may be true with NHS funded options, private therapy is for anyone and everyone who wants to talk, no matter what they are experiencing.

Therapy can be invaluable for resolving mental health crises, but is equally important when it comes preventing crises in the first place.

We all experience underlying stresses and frustrations, be it at work, at home, or socially. Those friends who wind you up, the things you partner does that frustrate you, the ‘yes, but’ person in the office…if we do nothing about these and constantly adapt our behaviours to what we believe to be suitable, these things just build up and can result in eventual explosion or exhaustion.

Proactive therapy is about bringing these nagging feelings to the fore and addressing them before they become an issue. Call it maintenance if you will, after all, you don’t wait until the wheels have fallen off before you take your car to the garage!

Through talking about these issues and what you think and feel about them, patterns can start to emerge that you weren’t conscious of before. These patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving might, outside of your awareness, have be responsible for all sorts of unsatisfactory outcomes in the past. Failed relationships, frustrated expectations, missed promotions, and feelings of helplessness and anger to name but a few examples.

Through therapy, these patterns can be changed. Through analysing historical situations and their outcomes, our future reactions can be redetermined, and better outcomes can be achieved.

The UK is catching up with the global trend towards de-stigmatising therapy, but there is still a way to go. In a 2025 conducted by the BACP, nearly two thirds of people reported having struggled with mental health in the past 5 years, but only one third had attended therapy, and whilst there has been a decline in the percentage of people who believe there is a stigma attached to therapy, this figure still stands at 42%.

So how can this gap be bridged? I believe that seeing a therapist, and being open about it, is not a sign of weakness but one of strength, and a signifier that an individual is committed to long term self-improvement. In turn, therapy should not be marketed solely as a service for people in crisis, but a service for anyone who wants to become more emotionally resilient and to benefit from the knock-on effects of improved emotional awareness.

The Power Of Naming

In my experience as a therapist, without doubt one of the most important concepts I have come across is that of naming.

When humankind uttered it’s first word, it was undoubtedly a noun. It must have been necessary to convey what something was before communicating what to do with it and how!

Over the millions of years since this first noun was uttered, we have developed a nuanced and complex system of communicating, in hundreds of languages across the world. You would think by now we had a name for everything!

In the myriad of human thoughts, feelings and behaviours, these names can range from happy to sad, depression to elation, shame to pride, there a thousands to choose from, but what if we go deeper? What if we look at the more complex and abstract concepts behind the formation of these feelings and their place in our personalities as reactions to external stimuli. We don’t get angry at random after all, something provokes it. We don’t feel happy for no reason, something makes us smile.

Different strokes for different folks is a saying that rings particularly true in the field of psychotherapy. People react differently and importantly, UNIQUELY to different stimuli in different situations. How do we name something which is unique to, yet shared by each of the 8 Billion plus people sharing this earth?  

These sets of reactions, these patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving can be categorised into groups, and Psychotherapists have borrowed nouns to name these phenomena.

Transactional Analysis theory names these groups and patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours as The Parent, The Adult and The Child Ego States. Everyone has them, and they form the key parts of our personality. If we are confidently feeling, thinking or behaving in a way which we rigidly believe to be right, irrespective of other people’s opinions, asking no questions and operating on autopilot, we are likely to be acting in our Parent Ego State (Programme). If we are experiencing strong positive or negative emotions and are struggling to control our reactions (fight/flight/freeze), we are likely to be in our Child Ego State (Reactive). If we are analysing input and using all current information to effectively achieve the required outcome from a situation, we are acting in our Adult (Rational).

These archaic and often outdated packets of information (Parent) and reactions (Child) can cause us problems in the present day, even spending too much time in our Adult Ego State can get in the way of intimacy and spontaneity.

Through the process of Therapy, as we group together our reactions to and behaviours in present day situations into these categories, we can start to understand what triggers bring around which ego state, and through building a nurturing and understanding relationship with our ego states, we can begin to choose which one we employ, when and how.

None of this would be possible without being able to name the parts of our personality we need to work with. This is why Psychoeducation and naming in particular plays such a major role in Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy.

What is in a name?

Quite a lot it turns out!