What counseling is not?

Counseling is not many things. For instance, counseling is not like your parents telling you what you need to be doing with your life. Sometimes, people assume that a counseling professional will tell them what they should be doing with their lives, but this is not the case. A counselor may give suggestions or ask you to do something different, but they will not tell you you have to do one specific thing.

Counseling is also not like talking to a friend. Friends have the best intentions for us, but because of this, they can sometimes unknowingly be a bit manipulative. They want the best for us, and sometimes they think they know what we want to hear or what they perceive as the best option for us. A counseling professional is a neutral third party who is going to listen to us actively. A counselor has training in setting appropriate boundaries and will work with us to identify what we need from that interaction.

Another thing that counseling is not is it isn’t always an easy process. People come to mental health therapists for many reasons. Sometimes, people believe that counseling will not involve much work on their part, and all they have to do is talk to the counselor, and that is it. This is far from the truth. Counseling often involves working on ourselves outside of a counseling interaction. It may require us to change our behavior and confront thinking patterns that we may be used to but do not really serve us very well.

Finally, counseling is not a process that can be done every once when one feels like it. In counseling, a licensed mental health professional will often spend time helping a client set up goals for the counseling process. Like any goal, counseling goals require effort and expending time to obtain them. If a person is not willing to do this, these counseling goals cannot be achieved. If someone is not working on their counseling goals, a counselor will gently confront that person about this issue.