Is counselling only useful to those with mental health issues?

“Counselling is only useful to people with really bad mental health issues, right?” Wrong!

So who is it for then?

I wanted to clarify this question as I believe that there is too much stigma associated with being open about how we feel with others.

As someone who has worked in many corporate environments with the usual office and competitive politics that take place, I noticed how tempting it was for everyone to give the impression that they were “OK”, and “Coping fine”, and yet there were many issues within corporate teams related to behaviour that took place that came from a place of insecurity. Behaviours such as the ‘passive aggressive’ emails that copy the boss, the prioritisation of tasks that put others to the bottom of the pile, deliberately being argumentative or confronting with no real justifiable reason. To be honest, I didn’t really see anyone with any severe mental health issues, what I saw was people demonstrating human nature reacting to the normal stimuli of working with others.

Here’s the thing, we react to others based on the experiences of our past. It is like we have a filing cabinet in our brains with all our experiences to date, filed away and we constantly compare the experiences of now, to one’s experiences of the past. In many ways this is completely normal, how else would we learn how to be safe in our everyday lives? In other ways, our brains start to build ‘scripts’ that determine how we interact with others. For example, you might feel uncomfortable when someone is arguing with you about something. You might have an opinion about people who don’t have a problem with arguing. You may not be taking kindly to the manner in which they are arguing. You might be making assumptions about what they are thinking about you because of the way that they are communicating, which in turn prompts you to experience an emotional response ultimately informing your next step in the interaction.

Will you engage? Will you withdraw? Will you try to use some kind of tactic to dial down what you think is ‘aggression’?

Perhaps you are focusing on the behaviour of the other person and completely losing sight of what they are trying to communicate. You could be missing out on an important piece of information that directly affects how you engage with others in the workplace because you were too focused on trying to feel safe in the face of someone else who was passionate about the point they were trying to make. Whilst all this is going on, the other person will be having their own filing cabinet moment because they struggle with feeling safe around people who don’t communicate what they are thinking.

When we interact with others, we can’t help but react. If we don’t react, we can’t interact. Sometimes though, everyone of us can gain benefit from stopping and having a think about why we react to certain types of people or situations and explore if our reactions are being formed from out of date strategies that, whilst once, may have served us well, now only seem to sabotage us.

Some of our strategies for living serve us…

Some strategies for living serve us and some don’t and it is those who recognise the need to more deeply understand themselves, who will ultimately get what they need in life to unlock their potential and live their best lives.

Therapeutic counselling is a great way to take time out and identify what difficult thoughts and feelings are holding you back, understand why and then use that information to make positive ‘course corrections’ in life.

Clients who come to me for counselling are NOT mental health patients, they are normal people going about their individual lives who simply want to live better.

How do you want to live?