Easy to say- Hard to do!

Seating at the counselor’s chair, giving psychotherapy to people, I understand and accept that when we talk about “matters of the heart” including, any type of life situation where people are involved, is very easy to give advice and very hard to follow when you are placed in the client’s couch.

A lot of people stop going to therapy because they get mad with the counselor, they either want to be told what to do, or they think that their problems are not understood because the professional counselor is not in their shoes.

“You don’t understand - You are not there - You should see the way he is when no one is around - You haven’t gone through what I have gone through”

The worst part is that in a way, they are right! I haven’t lived every single problem in this world, I haven’t suffered every mental disorder there is, I haven’t been a firsthand witness in their suffering but what I can offer are two important things: empathy and knowledge.

People come to therapy to fix their lives, the people around them, their own selves but at the end, they want a quick fix and if the fixing doesn’t come fast and easy, then therapy doesn’t work for them and the problem becomes the people around that don’t want to change and the therapist that doesn’t understand their problem.

Yes, I am a counselor and yes I know that giving advice is easier than trying to work things out when the problem is right there in from of us. I see it every day in my life, I work with myself everyday to make sure that what I teach, I follow and yes, yes, yes, it is hard!

To get a good perspective of things, you have to look from a certain distance and that is why counseling works, if you let it work, because even if the counselor hasn’t lived every single issue, he or she has the knowledge and the empathy to help you.

One of the main reasons why counselors cannot treat close friends or family is because we need to be able to help from a certain distance, we cannot involve personal feelings with our professional judgment, we cannot get so attached to clients to the point that we feel the need to rescue them.

If you have a problem you feel the need to work on, give psychotherapy a chance. Get mad at it and blame the counselor if you need to, that is good and part of the healing process but don’t let that stop you from going.

Achieving mental health takes time, takes energy and willingness to change, change from the inside out, from the space of forgiving and forgetting, from the unconditional acceptance of ourselves and the rest of the world, from a very hard but not impossible place to reach so yes, it is easy to say and hard to do but the way I see it, it is that if we stop saying it, then we will all stop doing it and that is just a waste of our lives.

#problemsolutions #understanding #counseling