So, what is Counselling anyways?
It’s got a lot of names: therapy, counselling, psychotherapy, getting your head shrunk. The list goes on and on. It also has a particular image in the media.
I’m sure you have seen the middle-aged man with a beard, huddled behind a notebook or clipboard asking “and how does that make you feel” to a distressed looking person laying on a couch or chaise while they talk about some awful experience. This usually ends with the therapist saying something brilliant, which leads to an epiphany, and suddenly everything is better.
While I would love to say I regularly have strokes of genius that lead to clients immediately recovering from their mental health challenges, that’s not how counselling really works. Would be nice though.
The reality is counselling is all about making change. Change that lasts through life’s ups and downs, change that can take on life’s challenges and still be there. To make this kind of change, at Cascade we focus on collaboration, learning skills, digging into those uncomfortable feelings, and yeah, there will be some homework. It involves hard conversations sure, but the fact is, it’s more about what you take from those conversations and how you use it to approach familiar challenges in new ways that really makes the difference.
To summarize all this, I will leave you with this: If you want things to be different, you must do something differently.
Are you ready?