What is Counselling

Counselling is a confidential and non-judgmental form of ‘talk therapy’ whereby an individual, couple or family meet with a trained professional counsellor to talk about issues and problems that they are facing in their lives.

Counselling can provide you with the opportunity to share your views, be heard and gain new perspectives on your situation and experiences, and is very useful to gain clarity surrounding issues.

Together with your counsellor you can begin to identify and work towards achieving the desired outcomes and goals for counselling.

According to 20/20: A Vision for the Future of Counselling, the delegates comprised of 31 counselling organisations agreed upon a unified definition of counselling:

Professional counselling is a professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, families, and groups to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals.

• Counselling is used to deal with a broad range of issues and problems that you may be facing.

• It can help you to deal with stress, provide treatment for anxiety and treatment of depression.

• Counselling can provide you with the opportunity to reassess or set new goals in your life and help you to gain clarity and direction.

• Counselling can be used to address issues and problems within your relationship or provide mediation between you and your partner.

• Counselling can help by allowing a very safe and private space for you to talk about issues and problems that are you having. These are problems that you may find difficult to talk to other people about because they feel very private. It may feel unsafe or uncomfortable to talk to your normal support network, friends or loved ones.

• A professional counsellor is trained and registered, and will provide you with a genuine, caring and empathic response to your problems. A trained counsellor will have tools and techniques that are evidence based. They can use these tools to support you or help you to move through the difficult, problem, feelings, behaviours, thoughts or situation that are you experiencing.

The process of counselling is where individuals, couples or family members meet with a professional counsellor to confidentially discuss problems in their lives.

The counsellor will draw on tools and techniques from their training and should provide understanding and empathy to their client, while their client works out how to move through the issues that they have brought to counselling.

During the process of counselling, goals will be identified, and this is the purpose of the counselling process. The goals can change if that is what the counsellor and client see as beneficial.

Counselling is often client-centred, the goal is for the client to make the decision on the best course of action with the support of their therapist. The counsellor can provide tools, techniques, suggestions and homework.

Ultimately it is the client who needs to make the decision on what is best for themselves as a key part of the process.

Counsellors can specialise and train in different areas to help certain groups of people.

Types of counselling include –

• Relationship and Marriage

• Vocational and Career

• Family Therapy

• Trauma

• Drug and Alcohol

• Addictions

• Rehabilitation

• Student

• Grief and Loss

• Depression

• Anxiety

• Sex Therapy

Types of counselling may also come from the method or approach that the counsellor uses such as; Behavioural, Cognitive, Systemic, Constructionist, Humanistic or Psychoanalytic.

There are many skills that are required to be an effective counsellor. First and foremost the counsellor must be genuine and can establish rapport with their client. For therapy to be effective the client/counsellor relationship must be healthy, genuine, safe, nonjudgmental and professional.

What are the 3 traits of counselling?

That counsellors strive to be caring, genuine and empathic to towards their clients.

Counsellors should use evidence based treatments from their formal training. Counsellors need to have a very large set of skills in their ‘tool box’ as every human and their situation is so different. Counsellors need to undergo professional development to keep their skill set current and up to date, utilising best practice methods.

Not every counsellor can help every client. Counsellors will need to have a strong community network and resources as part of their skill set. They will need to be able to recognise when they can not help someone and refer clients to alternative mental health supports for counselling.