Thread by @JonathanShedler

1/ Inexperienced therapists often confuse therapy goals with life goals. They're different. The goal of psychotherapy is *psychological change.*

“Treatment goals include areas that are influenceable by work on the self; life goals depend heavily on factors outside one's control.

2/ Therapy goals thus might include reducing perfectionism, increasing realistic self-esteem, resolving an internal conflict, making a difficult choice, mourning a painful loss, and so on.
Life goals include, for example, finding a partner or or spouse, getting a good job,

3/ becoming a parent. They may be attained more easily when therapy goals have met, but they are not themselves treatment goals. Clinicians cannot promise that at the end of the therapy there will be a partner, a job, or a baby; for those aspirations, too much depends on external

4/ circumstances.
Newer therapists need supervisory help in not signing on to pursue a client’s life goals, but instead reconceptualizing and reframing the clinical task as internally directed work that may increase the probability of achieving such goals.”
—Nancy McWilliams

5/ I would have preferred it if she had said “Treatment goals include areas that are influenceable by work on oneself” (not the self)