Counseling is a supportive process to aid clients manage and grow through a variety of life's challenges. Many people face difficulties in relationships, job-related stress and anxiety, various losses and grief, or normal, but difficult, developmental crises. Sometimes "unfinished business," past situations and experiences that have never quite been completely resolved, become blocks to personal progress and success. These pieces of "unfinished business" may often become the focus of counseling.
Counselors help their clients to solve problems, to refocus goals, to set career directions, and to heal painful wounds. Counseling often involves exploring questions that result in self- discovery and self-knowledge. In the process of healing, counselors and clients work together to examine thought patterns, behaviors, and emotions. Each of these areas provide valuable clues to what clients need best to support and enhance their lives. Clients work together with their counselors in an attempt to initiate a variety of ways to achieve personal hopes and dreams. Of particular importance in this endeavor is the exploration of all important areas of the lives of clients: not just the concrete facts of the situation (although these are very important) but also the behavioral, emotional, social, physical, and spiritual aspects and implications that are also part of the clients' concerns.
Counseling can occur within an individual, couples, family or group context. Most individual sessions are 50 minutes in length. Sometimes family and group sessions are 90 minutes or longer. Counselors may work in conjunction with other counselors, particularly when facilitating groups.
Counselors are trained at the graduate level to provide the type of caring and supportive environment necessary to encourage clients to be open and honest about their concerns. Although counselors do not have medical training necessary to be able to prescribe prescription drugs, they are educated to be able to recognize situations where medication might provide some relief for certain clients. Since medication can sometimes be very helpful in relieving a client's emotional distress, counselors are likely to collaborate closely with physicians to incorporate the potential advantages of medicine into clients' mental health treatment. It is, of course, the physician who is directly responsible for the prescription and monitoring of medication.
No one counseling style nor one theoretical approach to counseling will be suitable for every client. It is important for the client and the counselor to test how well they can work together. Clients may want to talk with their prospective counselors before they begin a therapeutic relationship. Feeling that there is a "match" between what the client wants and what the counselor can offer is crucial. Unfortunately, it may, on occasion, take several weeks before there is a final determination of the strength of a potential therapeutic alliance: new experiences and new relationships may initially be uncomfortable, even when headed towards an excellent "match."
For most people, change in itself, is difficult. This difficulty exists, even when the change is clearly for the better. Consequently, counseling may involve hard work, even if one's needed direction for change is clear. Counseling will require a commitment of time, money, and personal energy. Nevertheless, when faced with difficult questions, confusing life choices, and frightening and distressful situations, counseling is one way to begin to take small steps back to strength, clarity, and peace.
Professional Clinical Counselors (P.C.C.s) work with clients to
assist them to enjoy greater life satisfaction. P.C.C.s have received advanced
academic training and supervised experience to prepare them to diagnose and
treat counseling concerns that might be categorized as mental and emotional
disorders.