How can Counselling help?
About Counselling
At different times in our lives we can all feel miserable, sad or have a low mood, sometimes there is a cause for this, and we know what it is. Hopefully we have friends or family that we can talk to, and we are able to get back to normal in a short time.
Sometimes though, we are not able to shake the mood, and this turns into a long term condition that we struggle with. No matter how much our friends and family want to help, after a certain amount of time, they can run out of ideas and perhaps we don’t feel that we want to burden them anymore.
Going to see a professional counsellor can make all the difference. It is sometimes easier to talk to a non-judgmental, empathic person about your deepest feelings and fears, than talking to someone who knows you and is involved in your life. A counsellor is trained to objectively recognise behaviour and thought patterns, and gently challenge them at the right time, to give you insight into what may be happening in your unconscious mind.
Life is not easy, and in these modern times we are led to believe that we should be happy all the time, but that is not realistic, happiness is living a rich and meaningful life, which includes pleasure, satisfaction, love, friendship, but also pain, sadness, fear, anger and ultimately death.
Counselling can help you to become more resilient when these challenging emotions, feelings and situations occur.
People are given space to understand who they really are, therapy is not easy, but in a safe, confidential and supportive environment, it allows you to experience a myriad of emotions in a secure and holding therapeutic relationship.
WHAT CONDITIONS CAN IT HELP?
Counselling can help by firstly helping you to understand what depression is, and how it affects you, this alone can help to relieve the distress. It can help you confront difficult issues, and process them in a safe space.
Counselling can help with unhelpful anxiety in several ways. Mindfulness, can rewire the brains’ neural pathways and help you to relax more, Acceptance and Commitment therapy, and CBT can give insight into how your anxiety is triggered, and give you strategies to manage them, and by addressing the underlying causes, the symptoms of anxiety can greatly lesson, and sometimes disappear altogether.
Counselling can help people to connect with another person in a trusting safe relationship, where they can explore their deepest fears and feelings. They can process events and issues that have come up for them and it can help them to examine objectively what they want their future to look like, and what sort of relationship they want.
I work on relationship issues with both individuals, and couples, and this is not limited to romantic relationships. Parent and child, siblings or friends can also benefit from relationship counselling. Relationships don't have to have encountered problems for you to benefit from counselling, it can also be very useful for couples planning a life together, to ensure that you both know what to expect from each other and the relationship, and can better anticipate any problems that may arise in the future, so that you are able to ride the storms that inevitably will arise.
Counselling can help by working with you to learn self compassion, and to enable you to see and understand yourself, and be able to see the worthiness of you, and your place in the world.
If grief is a problem for you, counselling can help by figuratively ‘holding your hand’ through the grieving process, to help you to express the emotions that you are feeling, and to help you to move towards that new normal that your life will become.
Treating this has to be approached with great care, so as not to re-traumatise the person, it is not a quick fix, and each problem that arises throughout therapy has to be dealt with as it arises. It has to be done in an atmosphere of safety and security, the counsellor may have to "re-parent" the person, and slowly build a trusting relationship. I have worked with several clients who have suffered with chronic childhood trauma, and art therapy, and working with life timelines have been very helpful in assisting them to move on with their lives.
BENEFITS OF COUNSELLING
No one can wave a magic wand to totally get rid of your problems, but in learning to accept that they are a normal part of living and having that rich and meaningful life, building resilience to help you to cope when problems occur, being able to see them for what they really are, they will sometimes go away with very little fuss.
By being able to stop struggling with them, and putting your attention into activities that you value, your life will be so much more rich and meaningful.
