As a unique individual your reasons for wondering about counselling will be personal to you.

A relationship problem, a situation of loss, a behavioural issue or something else altogether might be troubling you.

A caring, qualified counsellor who focuses just on you can not only be supportive but also help you find a clearer sense of who you are and what you want and need to make your life better.

Some of the most common reasons people might seek therapy include:

  • Relationship problems: conflict with partner, children or work colleagues.
  • Loss: relationship breakdown, bereavement, redundancy, health problems, independence.
  • Abuse: physical or emotional.
  • Trauma: accidents, personal attack, bullying.
  • Transition: a career move, a new family, retirement.

Therapy could affect real change in your life.

The reasons you might seek a counsellor are not always so cut and dried and there’s plenty of other times when therapy could affect real change in your life.

  1. Is there something you need to change?
    • It’s easy to feel stuck in a rut where you sense that something needs to change. Does your job make you unhappy or do you say yes to friends and family when you wish you could say no? Therapy helps you delve a little deeper into these problems and identify the choices you are making and whether these choices are working for you or not. It can also help you look forward and think about what you really want in life.
  2. You just really need to feel listened to.
    • When weighed down by a particular problem it can feel like nobody is listening and so you bottle it up inside. Unwilling to burden friends or family with a burning issue you may even feel its something which those close to you might not be ready to hear.
    • A good therapist will however always listen attentively and really hear you.
  3. Your emotions are becoming out of control.
    • Your emotional response may be out of proportion to what triggered it; perhaps getting aggressive when stuck in traffic or feeling tearful when a friend cancels a lunch date? Often suppressed emotions rise to the surface but we push them down. Often long-standing emotions are from experiences we’ve had in the past which haven’t been dealt with or healed.
    • Therapy provides a supportive environment for you to unpick such repressed experiences.
  4. You’re feeling overwhelmed.
    • Life isn’t always straightforward and the pandemic has been an enormous challenge for many of us. Perhaps you have run out of strategies for dealing with out of control problems and it’s easy for anxiety to overwhelm you.
    • You might be unaware why you are feeling this way but counselling can help you understand and plan a better future.
  5. You want to improve the relationships with those around you.
    • Whether it’s your partner, children, parents or friends, relationships from the present and the past bring many issues to the surface.
    • A counsellor can help you recognize why you are drawn towards friendships which don’t make you happy; why you don’t get along well with your boss or work colleagues or why you can’t connect with your children as you’d like to.
  6. A different perspective.
    • Despite their best intentions you may find that friends and family are too close to offer an impartial perspective.
    • A skilled therapist, who is outside your immediate situation, can help you process difficult thoughts and feelings and allow you to figure things out for yourself.