Simon Weber Counselling and Psychotherapy

What happens in counselling and psychotherapy?

Going to counselling or psychotherapy is often misunderstood as a sign of weakness of failure. There is a commonly held cultural stigma about "getting help".

In reality what happens in counselling and psychotherapy is assisted self-help. Each client's difficulties in the world are explored on an individual basis and ways are sought from within each person to influence the problem being encountered.

The task is to search for some kind of new understanding of the problem -- what questions can be asked about this problem? What exactly is this problem and how does it operate? Where does it come from? How can it's arising be explained? Is it alone; or is it linked in with other problems?

As the answers to these questions develop, clients can begin to experiment with new ways of seeing themselves, running their lives and living out their relationships.

The process is not about advice giving, nor about applying formatted techniques, nor about offering proscribed ideas. It is interactional, focused very much on the actual experience of the client in the here-and-now, and seeks to obtain changes and improvements in life that fit each person's particular circumstances and aspirations.

My responsibilty as therapist is to find ways to enquire, drawing on established theory and a knowledge base about human experience built over many years since Freud invented the "talking cure" in the late 19th Century. Many others since then have added to this bank of ideas -- my job is to find out which parts of this fund of knowledge makes sense of each client's past and present experience; and to help that individual form from it and their own desires, new ways of living their particular life in a more fulfilling manner.