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okay so
one of the first things to know about
counselling is when people come into counselling, they often have a lot of ideas
and sometimes a lot of misconceptions about what counselling
is going to be like. One of the first misconceptions that people often have about
counselling is:
if I go into counselling, am I crazy? The answer is:
No! Most often, no, which is a good thing Think of it
this way.When you go and you see a physiotherapist,
You have a broken ankle. You have
maybe a twisted ankle or a twisted knee --
some kind of impediment that
impedes you from being able to function correctly,
impedes you from being able to walk properly without pain.
So what the physiotherapist usually does
is he or she will get you to go through some exercises or
do some stretches of some sort or some kind of activity
which will correct the alignment,
which will realign your knee or realign your ankle
or your foot or some other soft tissue.
Some of this is painful,
okay. In the short term it's painful to do the stretches or the exercises
but in the long term eventually what ends up happening
is you're able to walk
properly. You're able to walk without pain. Psychotherapy is the same way.
Counselling is the same way. You come in to see a psychotherapist
such as myself or a counsellor because you're in psychological pain.
You're in emotional distress or emotional pain. What we do
is we sit down and talk to you about what has been going on for you
and oftentimes clients will come in with some kind of,
what we call "cognitive distortion" or
some kind of false belief system about themselves
that has been malfunctioning
or has been dysfunctional for a number of years. What we do is we simply talk to
them and
just get them to make several adjustments or corrections in the way they view
themselves,
the way they interact with others and the way they view the world.
Now, just like in physiotherapy
in psychotherapy too, there can often be some pain so, it's not simply a passive
process.
When you go and you see the physiotherapist you will sometimes experience pain as
the
muscles are stretched or the ligaments or tendons or
soft tissue is stretched. Same thing in
psychotherapy. Basically,
we will get to work through problematic or difficult issues
that have happened within your life such that, at the end
when you finish your course of therapy just like when you finish
your course of
physiotherapy you're functioning much better
than you did before when you first came in your first session.