Counselling and Therapy
There is a great deal of overlap between counselling and therapy and a range of professional opinions about where one begins and the other ends. In my own view and practice I make the following distinctions:
- Counselling is generally short-term (usually a minimum of 4 sessions and up to about 4 to 6 months) and focusses on one or more specific problems in the person’s life. In counselling work we both hold aim/s in mind based on what you realistically might be hoping to change or achieve. This aim can be quite broad or specific but we keep the work steered towards it.
- I view all my work, including counselling, as psychotherapeutic. This means, even when I’m working with quite specific problem/s, focus and aims, I am also interested in the emotional world and history of the client. My attention encompasses all parts of the person I’m working with and I emphasise the importance of our relationship as it develops between us.
- Therapy is usually longer term than counselling (for example, usually a minimum of 12 sessions) or it can be open-ended (i.e. we continue working until you feel you’re ready to end). In therapy there is more of an opportunity to explore yourself as a whole individual and see how all aspects of your life, feelings, experiences and relationships interlink. This helps deepen insight and understanding and can help you make internal, more permanent changes. People often come to therapy because they recognise current difficulties being linked to their own behaviour, feelings, and past experiences, for example, repeating unhelpful patterns in relationships. You might decide to have therapy because you have troubling memories from the past, ongoing and chronic problems, or intense unmanageable feelings like despair, anger, distress. Sometimes people come because they don’t really know what the problem is and want help working it out.
- It’s not unusual to start having counselling and realise you need to explore issues on a deeper level. For example, sometimes an external or specific problem can emerge as being connected to other difficulties or patterns. In these cases we might decide to allow ourselves in the work to be more exploratory and aim to understand you on a broader, deeper and more complex level. This might also mean working for a longer period.
- One model of therapy I offer- psychoanalytic psychotherapy – places particular emphasis on the relationship between the therapist and the client and aims to help the individual to examine their complexities, including the more ‘hidden’ parts of themselves. This work needs a minimum of a year.