The main goal of psychotherapy is to produce long-lasting, profound change in the individual.

Successful therapy should enable one to be in touch with all of one’s emotions without feeling overwhelmed or owned by them. The quality of one’s psychic life improves as one learns to allow oneself to experience the vicissitudes of emotional life. This then leads one to feel more alive, solid and connected to others

This type of change can only occur through the direct re- experiencing of the specific moments and emotions associated with the original trauma that was then excluded from consciousness and converted into symptoms.

McCullough Vaillant once wrote “…the more one is able to laugh when one feels happy, cry when one feels sad, use anger to define specific limits, to make love passionately and to give and receive tenderness fully and openly, the more distant one travels from suffering. The more joy of living one feels, the easier it is to be generous and live with others”