Taking Treatment |
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The opportunity to communicate is one of the most welcome aspects of good relations with others. Just talking through a problem with a trusted relative or friend can do a very great deal to take the stress out of it; and those people who belong to any kind of religious community will find talking to their minister or co-believers particularly therapeutic.
However, such opportunities do not always present themselves when most required, and for a variety of reasons it may not always be feasible to talk in depth with people you know personally about problems or situations which you feel may be causing you undesirable stress. When this is the case, you may feel that you could benefit from some specialist professional help, such as that offered by counseling.
Counseling may be in special areas which are notoriously stress-prone, such as marital difficulties or coping with bereavement - many of the different organizations offer specialist counseling in one form or another. Or you may find that talking to a qualified counselor on more general terms is useful. Either way, recognition of the value of counseling is certainly constantly on the increase: to give just one example, physiotherapists are now learning counseling skills to give extra emotional support to their patients during treatment.
A counselor's main task is to enable the 'client' (the word is always used in preference to 'patient') to consider alternatives, both for ways of approaching situations and for thinking about and tackling problems. It is not the role of the counselor to give direct advice, but to point out possibilities, within a context of support and acceptance.
A sympathetic counselor, who may well have had direct personal experience of the problems facing his client, can offer invaluable help in finding solutions to difficulties that the client may see as insoluble, and working out coping strategies. In a good counseling session, stresses will be released, and issues clarified.
An important aspect of counseling is for clients to learn to accept themselves as they are, to enable harmful mental stress to be ultimately resolved. The counselor will help the client see for himself how bad habits have built up, and then discover how best to break them: for example, an ambitious, self-reliant personality is able to learn that success may be just as easily achieved by skilful delegation, while a compulsive worrier may learn to avoid imaginary anxieties by learning self-assertiveness and the use of special relaxation techniques.
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