One the key elements of counselling is the transformational power of words used to describe events, feelings, and memories. The role of your therapist is to be keenly aware of the details you share about the problem you are experiencing.
Where you opt to engage in couples counselling, this listening role of your therapist intensifies. The ways you speak about your problems constitutes the “evidentiary support” for mood, poor health, or generalised unhappiness and problem resolution.
Healing begins as soon as you speak, write, or share your views about the problem you are experiencing. The process of articulating a problem for another person to understand also helps you to further process and understand the problem for yourself. In this way, talking about your problem develops a framework for understanding it.
Therapeutic or counselling conversations are different from causal discussions with friends or family. A third party listener who is dispassionate that is, uninvested in your problem offers a neutral listening ground for the articulation of your problem-based perspective to take place. This is often an important first step, although not really needed to heal. Solution-Focused Therapy SFT begins by exploring times when the problem is different, less intense, or absent and never really enters the problem per se.
Once stated or articulated, your problem may be viewed, analysed, explored, and investigated by your therapist and yourself.
Of course, conversations are dynamic and transactional, such that your therapist contributes words or perspectives during the initial sharing of your problem. Some therapists and models only listen during this initial session. Others trained in single session or solution focused models, use even this first session to enter or join in the ways you tell your story, so to offer plausible words or perspectives for understanding your problem.
You will decide which models of therapy work best for you by how you feel at the end of your session and over the first couple of weeks of treatment.
You will also begin to feel better as the words and perspectives used to describe your problem change. As your heart heals, your words and perspectives do as well. Remaining open to the views of your therapist and those involved in counselling with you guarantees improvement.
#wellness #SFT #couplescounselling #healingwords