What is counselling?
Written by YBTC Counsellor, Paula Dalton
Counselling is a relationship designed to create a safe, reflective space for you to explore your thoughts, feelings and responses to your everyday world. When you are feeling distressed, it can often feel overwhelming and frightening that you don’t know where to turn.
Talking to friends and family can be helpful, but we can also feel like we are shielding them from our emotions so can keep certain things to ourselves.
With counselling, you don’t need to protect the counsellor’s feelings so it provides you with a level of freedom to talk about what is really important to you. During a counselling session, you discuss whatever is on your mind and the therapist will be led by you. This process of talking and the therapist listening, can be a very powerful experience, and this focused listening helps you make peace with your difficult circumstances.
Counselling sessions are 50 minutes long and initially this may feel like a very long time, however, the time passes quickly. Within this time, the counsellor will encourage you to examine your thoughts and feelings and can offer an alternative viewpoint if this is required. A therapist is highly trained to listen to you without judging your ways of handling situations and it is not the goal of therapy to behave as the therapist would behave but to develop your own style of dealing with life’s ups and downs.
Counselling will increase your self-awareness and provide you with strategies to build confidence and resilience that you will use for the rest of your life.