Counselling
Something isn’t quite right in your life. You know that you don’t need years of therapy to solve this problem, but you also know that you use a bit of help. You need someone to talk to who isn’t family or a friend—someone you can trust and feel comfortable talking with, but who isn’t involved in your life in other ways. The problem you are facing might personal and emotional, vocational or career-related. . . . Problems of living can arise all domains of life. Counselling is a way to work through these problems with a skilled-listener and helper.
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is better suited than counselling to treating more serious mental suffering. Problems requiring psychotherapy feel intractable, and the suffering that tends to characterise these problems can be profound. Psychotherapy is about deep, lasting, change. Sometimes, but not always, this means that the person seeking psychotherapy meets the clinical thresholds for diagnosable mental illness, but you don’t need a diagnosis to begin psychotherapy. Depression, anxiety, trauma, personality disorders, etc. are merely ways of labelling serious forms of mental suffering that require deeper and more sustained approaches to treatment than counselling can provide.
Relationship Counselling
Relationships can make us or break us. These can be early relationships with primary caregivers, or later relationships with family, friends, lovers, or co-workers. Sometimes we find ourselves in relationships that we know aren’t good for us, at other times we find ourselves in relationships that we ought to feel extremely grateful for, but which we we are ruining with compulsive, negative behaviours. Relationship counselling is a way to work through these problems—with the person concerned. This might be a lover or life-partner, a parent, sibling or friend. Some relationships are worth investing in, and relationship counselling can be a powerful way to move towards healthy, flourishing relationships with the people who matter the most in your life.
Coaching
Coaching, unlike counselling and psychotherapy, is not about relieving mental suffering, but rather about the optimisation of the self: at work, in love, in oneself. Many of the processes used in counselling and psychotherapy (exploration, insight, action and maintenance) remain relevant here, but they are aimed beyond the alleviation of mental suffering to individual self-actualisation and the realisation of human flourishing.