Who can benefit from counselling?
Seeing a counsellor can benefit anyone who is struggling socially, emotionally, circumstantially, or with mental health concerns. Reasons for coming to therapy are extremely diverse, varied, and individual.
Your reasons for coming will be met with openness.
If you have clarity about your reasons for coming to therapy, the following list of themes may be helpful. Themes are likely to overlap and interconnect, so you may recognise yourself in a number of areas, which is quite normal. It is also very possible that you have reached this point still feeling in the dark about why your life is a struggle – together we can gently bring to light what underlies this.
- Anxiety, or the inability to cope or concentrate, feeling overwhelmed - also see 'physical'
- Stress - problems dealing with stress, or difficulty recovering from stressful situations - also see 'physical'
- Confidence - lacking in confidence or suffering from extreme shyness of feelings of inadequacy.
- Sadness, depression and grief
- Loneliness and Isolation
- Feelings of emptiness or lack of motivation
- Extreme or unmanageable mood swings
- Feeling constantly undermined or disempowered
- Loss - difficulty coping with the effects of loss, such as bereavement, loss of relationship, loss of employment, loss of living situation, loss of children leaving home. - also see 'circumstantial'.
- Abusive behaviour. Abuse may be physical, it may also involve gross neglect, or be psychological, sexual, financial, material or discriminatory. Have you got concerns about your own tendency to be abusive, or a victim of abuse?
- Eating disorders and disordered eating
- Self harm - through inflicting physical injury on the self, or internal injury from isolating, eating disorder, or addiction.
- Anger and defensiveness
- Feeling the physical effects of anxiety and stress.
- UPPSs (GP term for Unexplained Persistent Physical Symptoms) - have you reached the end of the medical route for your physical symptoms yet they persist?
- SSDs (GP term for Somatic Symptom Disorder), whereby high levels of disabling rhumination disrupt daily living and trigger a physical stress response, manifesting physically in the body.
- Pain. Having dealt with acute pain through the medical route, sometimes chronic pain persists as a neural circuit problem, which is linked to emotions.
- Trauma - this is the term we use to do describe the physical response system held in the body as a result of overwhelming experiences we haven't been able to process.
- Please see my 'Diversity' page.
- Coping with the effects of abuse, - see 'behaviour patterns' above for your own abusive behaviour.
- Coping with relationship breakdown such as divorce.
- Coping with repatriation.
- Loss of employment or workplace difficulties.
- Loss of living situation.
- Difficulty making or sustaining relationships
- Repeatedly making unsatisfying or destructive choices in relationships
- Difficulty recovering from destructive relationships or breakdown of relationship.
- Sexual problems - whether questioning your sexual orientation or experiencing sexual problems in relationships
- See my Diversity page for GSRD (Gender, Sexual and Relationship Diversity)
*Physical – Many of my clients have been referred by their GP, when somatic symptoms persist without medical explanation (UPPS – GP term for Unexplained Persistent Physical Symptoms). The psychotherapeutic approach is useful here because of the fact that emotional difficulties manifest in the body. When we are working with the ‘psyche’, this refers to the physical body as well as the mind.
Finding the right therapist does not always happen on the first attempt. However, if you have come this far in wanting to look after yourself, it is worth trying again.