How can counselling or therapy help me?

The hope from counselling or therapy is to give you the space and time to talk about things that you are struggling with, or that are affecting you on a daily basis.  Whether it’s something you’re anxious about, feeling depressed about, or something distressing that you’ve carried with you for a long time, therapy helps you try to make sense of what’s going on.

Therapy looks at the patterns you might get stuck in (vicious cycles) and tries to understand why you do what you do, or don’t do as the case may be.  Together with your therapist (or counsellor) you try to work out alternative ways in which to understand your difficulties.  Once you have this understanding, then you and your therapist  try to work out different ways you can approach your situation.  In giving yourself these alternatives, you are suddenly giving yourself a choice about what to do next.  Often we’re stuck because we don’t feel like we have a choice.  Therapy helps us find an alternative so that we do have a choice: either we carry on as we are, or we do something different that takes us down a different path.  This different path we hope, eventually leads us to where we would much rather be than the present.

Having a thorough assessment at the start of your therapy is important in identifying what your main difficulties are, and what your main goals are.  Having achievable, manageable goals that you can reach in a reasonable time frame are key to getting the most out of therapy.  Your therapist will be able to help you work these out, and work out a plan as to which ones you can realistically work on in therapy.

If you have an issue that you’re struggling with, then send me an email, or call me via the contact page on the site so we can talk about it.