Clients frequently use the terms counselling and psychotherapy interchangeably but it might be beneficial to explain some of the differences forwards and backwards.
Counselling comes with a sympathetic ear to an individual in distress. Ideally the counsellor listens with full attention without interrupting for corrections, analysis or advice. The therapeutic price of being truly heard should not be underestimated. Deep listening seldom happens in ordinary conversation, where each person is evaluating the validity of what the other person states or considering his / her next response. Understanding that one’s listener has no other agenda, and does not interrupt, increases the speaker the freedom to express emotions or difficult thoughts at length, often making unanticipated connections in the act. Counselling will not necessarily require professional training. A dependable friend could fill the role of counsellor.
Along with listening, a counsellor offers solace. A heart-felt empathic response like “of course” offers the distressed person using the sort of safety and support which a loving parent provides child. A guarantee that the distressed person possesses the inner resources to cope with the situation accessible might help to mobilize those strengths. A counsellor could help someone in danger to acknowledge his / her thinking to be distorted somehow, at odds with objective reality, perhaps exaggerating the negatives while overlooking the positives. Ideally a counsellor may lead the distressed person from confusion by eliciting ideas for dealing with a situation rather than just providing answers.
Counselling may bring relief for confusion, distress, non-traumatic grief, temporary decrease of self-esteem, or bewilderment facing crisis. Counselling alone cannot heal true mental disturbances for example depression, anxiety, traumatic grief, unresolved childhood issues, or not enough self-esteem resulting from destructive core beliefs. These require psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy also involves carefully listening in order to see the presenting problem and detect the use of unexpressed issues. A psychotherapist invokes techniques learned during professional training to assist a customer effect changes in his or her life. There currently exist some fifty different therapeutic techniques, with Adlerian Therapy, Animal-Assisted Therapy, and Art Therapy at one end with the alphabet and Spiritual Therapy, Systems Therapy and Traumatic Incident Reduction in the other. But all have in common the application of specifically-chosen processes to create change. Normally, psychotherapy happens over a prolonged time period in most cases relates a client’s current difficulties to life-long, even multi-generational, patterns of behavior. Personality disorders including schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, or obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, may require medication as laid out in a psychiatrist besides the therapeutic intervention a psychologist or psychotherapist provides.
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