Counselling is a form of talking therapy that, through exploring and discussing what bothers you or makes you feel stuck or unhappy, can help improve your understanding of yourself and your problems. It can empower you to develop healthier thoughts, behaviours and internal tools for dealing with life’s challenges, make more conscious choices, and arrive at more favourable solutions. In short, it is a self-development therapy that can help you grow while recreating and changing your life for the better.

Talking about worries, anxieties, problems or uncomfortable emotions with someone who can truly listen to you is one of the simplest ways to unload the negative burden you may have accumulated throughout life. Such burdens are likely to be continuously fuelled by new stressors and daily hurdles, unconsciously affecting your actions and forming a toxic cloud that obscures your potential and true identity. Counselling helps to uncover and process what has been suppressed, allowing it to be addressed at a deeper level, brought to consciousness, and released. This can create a space for healing and allow new energy to flow through, enabling positive change to occur.

Historically, the term ‘counselling’ was first applied to psychological problems in the 1930 when Carl Rogers used it to describe his Person-Centred therapy, which placed human growth and positive transformation at its centre. This approach stood in contrast to Freud’s psychoanalysis, the dominant form of psychotherapy at the time, which focused on human pathology. Since psychotherapy could only be practised by medical professionals then, naming his therapy ‘counselling’ allowed Rogers and other psychologists to offer it as a form of psychological therapy. The term ‘counselling’ is perhaps somewhat inaccurate, as in a therapeutic context it does not primarily involve giving advice. Instead, like psychotherapy, counselling entails deep introspection and self-exploration, enabling individuals to expand their consciousness, take responsibility for their choices and actions, and develop healthier ways of functioning. Psychosocial education plays an important role in this process. In this sense, counselling is very similar to psychotherapy and the two terms are often used interchangeably.