What is counselling?
Counselling is a way of enabling choice or change. It’s also a way of reducing confusion. The counsellor will help you see things more clearly, possibly from a different perspective. In the counselling sessions you can explore various aspects of your life and talk about them freely and openly.
The counselling sessions provide a safe and confidential environment where you can explore your feelings, difficulties and distress or perhaps your dissatisfaction with life, or loss of a sense of direction and purpose.
”The counsellor may help the client to examine in detail the behaviour or situations which are proving troublesome and to find an area where it would be possible to initiate some change as a start. The counsellor may help the client to look at the options open to them and help them to decide the best for them.” (British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy)
What is the role of a counsellor?
The counsellor will provide you with a supportive relationship which you may use for your own personal development, growth and change. You would be accepted without judgment or criticism and with unconditional positive regard. By listening to you attentively the counsellor aims to develop empathic understanding of your problems so that she could begin to perceive what it feels like to be in your shoes and to see the world through your eyes.
The counsellor will encourage the expression of feelings because feelings such as anger, anxiety, grief and embarrassment can become very intense if repressed. Counselling offers an opportunity to explore these feelings, with the possibility of making them easier to understand. However, counselling does not involve giving advice or directing you to take a particular course of action.
