Everyone can benefit from counselling

You don’t need to have mental health problems to benefit from counselling. Everyone can benefit from counselling. Counselling isn’t always someone in a crisp white clinical suit with a clipboard in an official office. Counsellors dedicate their lives to helping people make the most out of their life and enable people to deal with issues more effectively.

There are so many different areas of counselling, from talking therapies to intensive therapy. Counsellors and therapists offer such a wide range of services. These include just listening to someone’s problems and giving then a non-judgemental response, explaining worksheets to help you control wayward thoughts or emotions, helping you to figure out how to use your time more effectively, help reduce anxieties as well as such a huge range of others.

I’d like to help people truly understand what counsellors and therapists do and don’t do. Every therapist is different and does things differently, finding a therapist that you get along with is the most important thing when seeking out help. You have to feel there is a connection with the therapist to enable you to open up to them. Also, if you visit a therapist that you don’t feel the connection with, please tell them. They are trained to deal with this situation and won’t take offence at all.

Certain types of therapists deal with certain areas in the large pool of services. Some will look at your past to help explain your present, while others hold no need for your past experience and only focus on the present and to the future. Some use lots of worksheets, diaries and journals while others don’t. This is dependent on the type of counselling service you go for and what issues you would like to work on.

Coaching also uses certain counselling skills to enable you to make the best of your time and life. Hypnotherapists also will use certain counselling skills as well to gain the information they need to use effective hypnosis to help with a range of different problems, issues or phobias.

One thing that counselling isn’t is a magic cure. You have to invest yourself when doing therapy as the therapist can only guide you, the hard work is ultimately down to you. They will help give you tools to enable you to make change, but you have to use these tools, it’s more than just turning up once a week/fortnight and expecting miracles just by attending. Hard work, time and willingness to change and needed for any therapy to be effective.

If you’re thinking of using the services of a counsellor or therapist, my best advice is start a journal. Write down your thoughts and feelings, what it is you want help with and take it with you. Anxiety of the first appointment can make you forget certain elements so having it down in a journal will help with some of that anxiety in the sense that you don’t have to remember everything, you can simply go and explain you would like help then refer to your journal for more specifics. Your journal is your space to keep your thoughts, write down questions you want to ask at your next meeting, keep a track of your moods and trigger points. Write down anything you feel is necessary to enable you to give the therapist a full picture, they are not there to judge but to help you work through the problems you have and move forward with your life, to help you make it better.

Counselling can help you see things from a different perspective, give you tools to change unwanted behaviours and help you move your life in a more positive direction. Sometimes things can get worse before they get better but this is part of the process. If your struggling to deal with a certain issue and supress it then it will need to be brought back to the surface to be dealt with effectively and give you the tools to deal with it effectively should it happen again, rather than letting it fester and become worse and more consuming.

Like I said everyone can benefit from counselling in some way. Even the people who seem to have it all together will have things they struggle with. It’s always better to deal with an issue than try to ignore it as this will only end up making it worse and your therapist will help you with ways to help and give a different perspective on things. Life is journey and making the best of your situation. Not all therapists charge you the earth for their time and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in seeking help. It’s better to deal with things now and have the tools to move forward than leave it thinking it will go away, it normally has a nasty way of coming back to bite us even worse.

Life is too short to have more problems than necessary, use these people who want to help you make the most of your life and don’t be afraid, they are not there to judge you, they are there to help and support you. They have spent years training and continue to train throughout their career in order for them to offer the most effective service.