What is Counseling?

Counseling is a “human connection”, a helping relationship which allows individuals to develop their true potential. This relationship is non-directive meaning that it is based on the belief that individuals are already endowed with all necessary resources to improve their lives and their relationship with the surrounding world.  A helping relationship means one that creates the right conditions for such natural resources to emerge. The main tool to achieve this is simply a dialogue, an extraordinary  kind of dialogue which allows a person to see oneself and one’s path. Counseling expands in the 1950’s with the development of the humanistic approach in psychotherapy which deviates from the psychoanalytical school and focuses on the individual’s freedom of choice, responsibility and ability to change one’s life.

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How does Counseling differ from Psychotherapy?

Psychotherapy works on mental health problems and personality disorders and is therefore a long-term treatment (from one to several years). Counseling focusses on different kinds of existential crisis and other traumatic circumstances which commonly occur during the course of one’s life and for which one may feel bereft of the necessary resources. Counseling views health in terms of development and promotion of one’s wellbeing, discovery of one’s potential rather than a condition of  absence of disease altogether.

 

How does it work and how can it help you?

Counseling is mainly based on the belief that every single individual has the inherent capacity to change his or her own life, lead an existence that is not strictly determined by the environment, the past or genetics and respond to any external circumstance in new ways thanks to the acquisition, via counselling, of a new vision of life. This helping relationship begins with a request for professional support by an individual who feels uneasy about a new situation generating some kind of interior conflict.

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The following are a list of topics most commonly tackled by Counseling:

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• Relationship to the partner

• Relations with family members

• Relations on the job

• Re connection with oneself and one’s self-awareness

• Work and life balance

• Change of residence

• Support of an ill relative

• Revision of one’s life plan