Benefits and Challenges of therapy

Knowing your aims

I work in a humanistic way, also sometimes described as person-centred or client centred, which basically means that I am here as your facilitator and that you are the expert on you, as only you can know your inner-most thoughts. As such, I am not here to provide an advisory service. I am here to help you to explore your situation, your perceived problems and the options available to you, including the options you didn’t initially recognise that you had, so that you can choose the way to proceed that is best for you.

From the start I want to know what your goals for therapy are, i.e. what you want to come away with from these sessions. Knowing this helps us to focus our approach, to help us get you from where you are to where you want to be. The size and complexity of these goals and the pace at which you can comfortably work through your challenges will have some influence on how many sessions will be needed.

I also want to know if you’ve had any kind of talking therapy and if so, what worked well and what didn’t, so that we can use more of the things you found helpful before and avoid using the things you know were unhelpful to you.

I work in an integrative way, which means I call upon the tools and approaches that appear to best fit when it comes to resolving the problems you are presenting.

I work with a pluralistic philosophy, which means that if there is more than one way to approach a problem, I’ll let you know what those approaches are so that we can collaboratively choose which approach to take.

Benefits

Some of the potential benefits of individual counselling are:

• improved interpersonal skills, communication skills and ability to resolve conflict
• improved self-esteem and greater self-acceptance
• ability to change break old, unhelpful habits self-defeating patterns
• recognising that not emotion is ‘good’ or bad’, with a better ability to recognise, express and manage own emotions, including anger
• lessening of low mood / diagnosed depression and improved coping strategies
• reduced level of anxiety and stress and improved coping strategies
• improved self-awareness and self-acceptance
• increased faith in self, confidence and ability to make decisions
• improved problem-solving abilities

Limitations

Some of the limitations or drawbacks of individual counselling are:

• Discomfort during the process - for therapy to work you need to be at a point where you are open and ready to engage in it. Therapies tend to involve a stage that is described as a ‘healing crisis’, where you feel worse for a time as everything sinks in before you start feeling better. If you are finding this stage difficult, please raise it so that we are both aware of how you are coping in the moment. You will need to be aware of the pace of disclosure that works for you. As a side note, if using online counselling there is a risk of sharing things sooner than you are ready to.
• Potential leakage of privacy - everyone involves takes an oath about confidentiality. Sharing anonymised details about your situation can only be done with your express permission, granted prior to any disclosure. This includes in anonymised cases studies.
• If the counselling relationship is not handled properly, such as a sudden halt before disclosed content has been properly worked through an resolved, this may lead to more negative impact for the client.
• If the content to be worked through is particularly complex, or has been a problem for a very long time, this can make the presented problems less straight-forward to resolve. It can be difficult to make and maintain changes that feel alien in comparison to how you would normally do things, so can be a reason for more sessions being needed before therapy concludes.

I hope you have found this helpful.

Best wishes,
Emma