What’s counselling and psychotherapy?

People are sometimes surprised by what happens in counselling. People have assumptions that the counsellor will deliver wise advise, be a friend, heal an illness, or convert the client to a new religion. That’s not what counselling or psychotherapy is about.

Lots of people assume that counselling is endlessly talking about one’s childhood, bashing one’s parents and generally reviewing how unfair life has been. That’s not counselling or psychotherapy.

Counselling does sometimes include wise advice, a friendship-like relationship, and counselling does offer relief from some illnesses, but those are only some pieces of the puzzle.

People who have received counselling offer remark that the process is very natural. It is having a friend who always tells the truth, it is having a conversation where the focus of attention stays on the important things, it is a safe place to think out loud and courageously feel the feelings that are locked up inside.
Most of all counselling is discovering the patterns of your life and the meanings behind experiences that you make in the things you do. It is thinking and talking about how you think and how you talk about yourself and your relationships. It is thinking and talking about what you aspire to in this life and how you may be actually be making it harder or impossible for yourself to reach your goals. It is about stopping life for an hour at a time to look inside and see that the resources you need for change may will be lying within you, dormant and unrecognised. The spark of something eternal and beautiful is there – do you know it?

Philosophers and poets remind us that each one of us has the freedom and the responsibility to live our own life. No one needs to ‘get a life’. Each person has one already. Tragically, lots of people avoid or try unsuccessfully to delegate away the responsibility to be themselves – their own life. Happiness and fulfillment comes from grabbing hold of the cards we have been dealt: man or woman, black or white, ‘good’ family or ‘crazy’ family and living out the hand we’ve been dealt to the very best of our ability.