Does merely ‘talking to someone’ help?
On hearing the term ‘counseling’, people often wonder how merely talking to someone can help them address the problems of their life? Well, that’s where some important clarifying is required.
First of all, counseling is not about merely talking. The process of counseling takes talking to a much deeper level. When you talk to a counselor, you talk with the lightness of not being judged and the confidence of being heard without prejudice. Secondly, you are not talking to just any ‘someone’. The counselor listens to you not in just an empathetic but also in a therapeutic manner. The conversation is being subtly navigated without a hurry to reach conclusion or haste to infer prematurely.
Yes! A qualified professional ‘counselor’ isn’t just a set of ears but a combination of a receptive heart and an observant mind at work – with the twin purpose of connecting to you emotionally as well as addressing your problems rationally. So the counselor is simultaneously relating to you in the most healing ways, diagnosing the real reasons of your unease, spotting the configuration of your thought patterns, as well as charting out the navigation for you towards the fulfillment of your counseling goals.
And all this happens within the framework of psychological principles – the concepts that have stood the test of times and the scrutiny of science. These concepts both guide as well as govern the process of counseling. They facilitate the connection between the counselor and the client and substantiate the practice of resolving a problem. So, counseling is not an amorphous chatting that takes its own course. It is a seemingly effortless but a seamlessly constructed ‘progression’ based on proven methodology.
In other words, it is not ‘merely talking to someone’, it is the ‘conversation that heals and navigates’.
Dr. Sandeep Atre
Counseling Psychologist (www.dratrecounsels.com) and ‘Emotional Intelligence’ Expert (www.socialigence.net), with experience of 20+ years. Author of ‘Understanding Emotions Logically’ and ‘Observing Nonverbal Behavior’.