Would counselling or therapy help?
Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Couch
(Note: I am not a psychoanalyst. This picture is a fond nod to the origins of my profession.)
When is it helpful?
Counselling or therapy can be helpful when your usual ways of dealing with challenges in life aren't working. It may be that some sudden, overwhelming thing has happened in your life and you need extra support. Or perhaps what usually works for you is now actually making your situation worse. Or you may feel as if life has never prepared you to deal with certain kinds of things, and you want to or feel you must face them now.
Counselling and therapy are not cure-alls. With the right help, some life problems can be more or less "solved"; others are not so easy. Good counselling will help you come to terms with both kinds of problems in ways that strengthen your dignity, improve your quality of life, and deepen your connections to others.
Different kinds of problems
People bring many different kinds of problems to counselling. Some people know what is bothering them but can't seem to find a way to deal with it. Others feel a nagging unhappiness they can't quite name. The distress a person feels may be extreme and impossible to ignore or it may be like a dull ache that gnaws away in the background for months and years.
Sometimes the source of the problem is recent, like a divorce or a job loss. Sometimes the problem feels rooted in the past, in how a person grew up or in some event from long ago. A problem could come from a single traumatic event or it could be a long term situation, or a combination of both.
Over the years I have helped people with problems including:
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Counselling vs. psychotherapy
To many people, both professionals and non-professionals, there is a difference between counselling and psychotherapy. But where the difference lies is subject to some debate.
When people make a distinction between the two, they usually mean that therapy is somehow "deeper," more thorough or wide-ranging, more challenging to do as either client or professional, and that counselling is less of some or all of these things.
Each term has its pitfalls. "Psychotherapy" sounds threatening to some people, like you must have something terribly wrong with you to need it (which of course is not true), or that the process is very heady and clinical (which again is not true, or shouldn't be). "Counselling" makes many people think of being given advice (which should be fairly rare) or of being "talked to" and cajoled or jollied into feeling better or behaving differently (which in my view is not very helpful). It seems you can take your pick of bad connotations.
My observation is that the work of counselling or therapy can be more or less deep, thorough, challenging, helpful or valuable, but that its qualities depend much less on what it is called and much more on the professional, the client, and the relationship between them. This may sound like a cop-out, but it's not: What the work is called is far less important than how it goes and how it feels. I encourage you, as a client, to pay attention to that.
Getting what you want out of counselling or therapy
You have a right to get what you want and need out this work, and to bring that up with your counsellor or therapist.
If you feel like you are getting the right kind of help, that is a good and usually dependable sign.
On the other hand if you feel like you and the professional you are seeing somehow aren't clicking or aren't doing much that's valuable to you, that's also important information.
I encourage my clients to bring up feelings that they aren't getting what they want. That can seem like a difficult subject to broach with your counsellor, but it can often lead to much better results, either within or outside of our work together.