Will you take _personal responsibility_ for coming to regular appointments on time? Can you _give up_ any real payoffs of being emotionally troubled? When _any_ approach to therapy is successful, it is in large measure because a client has strong personal motivation, a strong will. However, some approaches to therapy depend more heavily than others on a client's strength of determination. They include: M, O, E, P, I, N, H, A, X, T §2 Commitment to the Process of Therapy Do you believe you can commit yourself to therapy that spans many months and sometimes several years? If you hope to gain long-lasting benefits from your experience in therapy, you will need to commit yourself to certain practices and ways of thinking _after_ formal therapy has ended. Do you feel that you have this kind of _tenacity_ and _ability to follow through_? These are both qualities related to self-discipline, but they have more to do with sustaining a process over a long period of time: in a word, _commitment_. Do you feel you can develop a strong sense of commitment to long-term therapy? A To a long-range plan for life improvement? H, M {81} §_3 Patience_ If you are suffering from incapacitating anxiety or depression, being patient about the process of therapy can be very demanding. Long-term therapies require more patience, endurance, and tolerance than do short-term therapies. Are you able to put your trust in a process where results are noticed only very gradually? (If not, you may feel that what is most urgent now is to obtain prompt relief from symptoms--see the "Summary of Main Approaches to Psychotherapy," at the end of this chapter, to get some idea of the average durations of the different therapies.) Therapies especially requiring patience--with yourself, with the challenge, or with the duration of therapy--include: A, H, M, X §4 Initiative Some approaches to therapy offer very little direction or specific advice from the therapist. Do you feel that you have the initiative to proceed without explicit direction from the therapist? If so, what you probably need in a therapist is primarily the capacity to understand you well, to accept you as a person, and to encourage you in a warm and positive way to do what you think is best: B §_5 Tolerance to Frustration_ Do you have a fairly high threshold of frustration when your beliefs and ideas are challenged? When you do not immediately get what you want, can you tolerate fairly well what may seem like a long route to get where you want to go? (Do you cope well with the frustration of getting lost in your car, for example?) Can you tolerate, without serious irritation, anger, or hurt, being pushed to confront some of the pretenses or distortions or illusions you may have lived by?