How To Know If You Need Counselling

 Ironically the people who most need counselling often don't have the self awareness to realize that this is what they need. To develop self awareness you may need counselling and this is the difficulty in deciding.  This blog will help you decide if you need counselling. Our brains are not designed to be critical thinkers. This is a skill that really should be developed in childhood. The ability to critically evaluate is probably the greatest skill you can learn. If you can learn to take a step back and evaluate yourself you will be able to tell if you are struggling or if you are developing irrational thought processes to survive life. Here are some tips to taking a step back and critically thinking.

If you are emotionally elevated you cannot think clearly because your body has gone into the fight, flight or freeze survival mode. This takes all the blood away from the part of your brain that you need most to think critically. When making the decision in relation to if you need counselling or not you really have to be in a calm frame of mind and be able to think rationally about yourself.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

Am I bringing past relationships into present relationships?  This could be relationships with friends, co-workers, bosses and past lovers or parents.  You can tell you are doing this if you tell yourself things like "All men ..." or "All women..." perhaps you are saying "All bosses...". While there might be similarities to these groups you are not giving yourself an opportunity to get to know the unique individual that you are interacting with.  It's not fair to the other person and it isn't fair to you to project your past experiences onto another person. You might be missing out on getting to know the best boss you ever had.  They are missing out on getting to know the amazing you because you are holding something of yourself back in order to avoid getting hurt.  Counselling can help you with this.

If you are having trouble in your life with anxiety, depression, sleeping, moving forward or getting into a good set of habits. If you are stuck in some aspect of your life.  An example of this might be you can't lose weight and you tell yourself "Oh well this is what I am, a fat person". If you find yourself lying in bed thinking a lot and not sleeping at all, counselling might help. If you are stuck in your relationship things might be stagnating, you might benefit from counselling.

There are so many reasons why counselling might benefit you.  The brief answer is if you sit down and take a good hard look at yourself using your critical thinking brain and think I could be doing better than I am, you should perhaps look into counselling or some other way of improving yourself.

If you would like some help deciding if you need counselling this week all my initial sessions are free.  These could be via messenger, Skype, text or email or you can call the above number. Next week I will look into what to look for in a counselor. In the meantime a quote from Ali:

References:

Barlow, D. H., & Durand, M. V. (2012). Abnormal Psychology. (6th, Ed.) Belmont, CA, USA: Wadsworth.

Gerald, D., & Gerald, K. (2001). Basic Personal Counselling. Frenchs Forest NSW: Pearson Education Australia.