‘Talking Therapies’ & Life Skills You Can Learn From Them

In life, we readily accept that one needs to take training in order to achieve certain things. We go to school to learn to read and write, and to university to learn a profession. Understood in this context, there is no reason why counseling or life guidance should seem like a weakness. It is simply the act of devoting time and thought to planning our way of existing in the world, including how to skillfully avoid obstacles. Fortunately, ‘talking therapies’ no longer carry the stigma they once did and are widely accepted both as a cure for mental health issues, as well as a wise choice of complementary life therapy.

Counseling is a private and confidential process that gives you the forum to talk through and analyse your response to problems. In a session officially dedicated to you, you can be open and honest in a way not achievable with a friend, where the relationship is supported by other elements. When you are alone with your counselor, you don’t have anything to think about except yourself and knowing that it’s a practice you’re paying for will cause you to feel the impetus to get the most out of your time. A good counselor will make you feel understood and validated, while encouraging methods of healing emotional problems and rationally setting out your goals in life. As such, regular counseling can help you to learn to self-manage recurring emotional problems, which brings a host of wellness benefits to your personal life and relationships.

Counseling provides a good start to reflecting on and improving your life skills. However, deeper issues may require a deeper therapy. Deeply implanted emotional issues may require psychotherapy, which represents a longer, or indefinite course of sessions looking into the entrenched past causes of bad emotional habits. Psychoanalysis and all its later forms dig deeply into your past, especially your childhood, in finding trigger points for the things that still affect you.

These two categories of ‘talking therapy’ are extremely brief and fail to indicate the variety of similar treatments available. Therapists have taken the best bits of multiple trends in a hundred years of psychological practice, which means that many therapies now mix the best modern discoveries with the purest ancient arts of mindfulness and meditation. This means that there is now an incredible range of ‘talking therapies’ available that take a successful and pragmatic approach to the life skills you need to create true emotional wellbeing.