Counselling is a form of talking therapy that, through exploring and talking about 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, whilst recreating and changing your life for better.

Talking about worries, anxieties, problems or uncomfortable emotions to a person 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 charged by new stressors and daily hurdles unconsciously affecting your actions and forming a toxic cloud covering up your potential and true identity. Counselling helps to get to the bottom of what has been suppressed so that it can be processed at a deeper level, brought to consciousness and released. This can create a space for healing and new energy to come through, allowing a positive change to happen.

Historically, the term ‘counselling’ was first applied to psychological problems during the 1930 when Carl Rogers used it to name his Person-Centred therapy, placing human growth and positive transformation at its centre. This was opposite to Freud’s psychoanalysis, which was a dominant form of psychotherapy at that time and focused on human pathology. Since psychotherapy could only be practised by medical people at the time, naming his therapy ‘counselling’ enabled Rogers and other psychologists to apply it as a form of psychological therapy. This term is perhaps inaccurate, since in a therapeutic context it does not have much to do with giving advice. Instead, similarly to psychotherapy, counselling involves deep introspection and self-knowledge that allows one to expand one’s consciousness and take responsibility for one’s choices and actions, whilst developing healthier ways of functioning. Psychosocial education plays an important part in this process. In this sense, counselling is very similar to psychotherapy and both terms are often used interchangeably.