Why Use Counseling?
How Can Counseling Help?
Asking these questions helps determine a rational starting point:
- Have I tried changes on my own, or with other therapists and they failed?
- Have I acted in problematic ways that I never intended?
- Have I lived in ways that cause my problems to persist?
- Have I been experiencing intense shame and regret that interferes with life?
- Have I been experiencing deep sadness and depression that interferes with life?
- Have I been experiencing anxiety and worry that interferes with life?
- Have I been confused, pushing people away?
- Has someone I love encouraged me to seek counseling?
Motivations for Counseling
- Anxiety and Depression
- Grief, Loss and Bereavement
- Managing Stress and Change
- Family, Parenting and Divorce
- Anger Education and Management
- Relationship Aggression and Abuse
- Behavioral and Substance Addictions
- Phases of Life and Developmental Change
- Academics, Education, Employment, Career, Finances
Premises and Purposes of Counseling
- Affirms as self-evident that people are generally healthy, seeking wisdom, positive change and maturity
- Brings ways of learning, helping to improve emotional, mental, relational and spiritual growth and wellbeing
- Helps develop greater understanding of the nature of the mind, and integrating learned experience in life
- Respects people as possessing natural, divine drives towards growth, learning and flourishing as human beings
- Teaches greater understanding of relationships between cognition, perception, behavior and emotion
Cultivating a Healthy Mind
- The Human Condition: To one degree or another, deep in our souls, we desire essentially the same from life: love, respect, happiness, a sense of fairness, well-being, purpose, value, and the feeling of being connected to something substantial, lasting, secure and sacred. Likewise, as certain as this is, we may misperceive that our experiences in life fall short of the expectations we hold for our rightful share at times. Just as certain, we shy away from accepting this reality. Effective Counseling begins in with the appreciation of our Human Condition.
- Language matters: The words ‘Counseling’ ‘Psychotherapy’ and ‘Therapy’ are often conflated, used interchangeably. These are important distinctions to consider. By definition, the words “therapy” and “psychotherapy” refer to a process of healing by applying treatments aiming to cure injury or illness. This medical model of presumptive disease lends to over-pathologizing common human life experiences of ordinary pain and suffering. Perceiving life this way can inhibit growth and development towards natural flourishing in life. Temporary difficulties are not proof of overall mental illness, disease or pathological disorder.
- Perception matters: Psychotherapeutic counseling engages a process of learning to observe and change ways of perceiving, thinking and behaving, and applying these changes to better manage or reduce human mental and emotional suffering.
- Thinking matters: Psychotherapeutic counseling serves the purpose of assisting people in applying what is learned, towards modifying patterns of perception, cognition, behavior, emotion, personality and temperament, for living within constraints of the human condition.
- Behavior matters: Our basic survival instincts, which function involuntarily at the core of our being, in the background of consciousness, influence perception, cognition, behavior, emotion, shaping personality and temperament, towards striving for living, loving and thriving.
- Feelings are temporary: Consequently, our basic survival instincts as human beings orient us towards identifying potential problems, dangers and threats to our basic existence, real or imagined, thus producing a state of being generally unwell, or suffering.
- Putting it all together: Compassionate psychotherapeutic counseling naturally regards all people as miraculous, essentially whole, healthy and capable, despite common ordinary human experiences of pain and suffering.