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What Counselling Is and How It Can Help You
- Therapy-with-Ben
- Sep 29
- 17 min read
Let's clear up a few things about counselling right from the start. It’s a confidential, supportive conversation with a trained professional, but it’s not about being ‘broken’ or needing to be ‘fixed’. Think of it as a proactive step towards understanding yourself on a deeper level and navigating life’s inevitable challenges with a bit more clarity and confidence.
What Counselling Is Really Like
Forget the stiff, clinical stereotypes you might have seen in films. The best way to understand counselling is with an analogy: it’s like having a personal trainer for your emotional wellbeing. Just as a trainer helps you strengthen your body and improve your physical health, a counsellor provides the support and tools to build your emotional resilience and mental fitness.
This is a partnership, through and through. It's dedicated time just for you, completely free from the usual expectations and judgements of daily life. This is your space to talk openly about what’s on your mind—whether it’s anxiety, relationship issues, big life changes, or just a general feeling of being stuck—without worrying about how the other person will react.
The growing understanding of its value is undeniable. The UK's mental health therapy market recently hit approximately USD 14.78 billion and is expected to climb to USD 19.12 billion by 2033. This isn't just a number; it shows a powerful shift where millions are actively choosing to invest in their mental health.
The Foundations of a Good Therapeutic Relationship
The real magic of counselling happens within the relationship between you and your counsellor. This partnership is built on a few core principles that make the space feel safe, productive, and genuinely helpful.
Empathy: Your counsellor works to see the world from your perspective, offering genuine understanding without judgement.
Trust: Confidentiality is everything. It creates the secure foundation you need to feel comfortable being open and honest.
Professional Guidance: Your counsellor is a trained guide. Their role isn't to give you answers, but to help you find your own.
The most important factor in what makes counselling helpful is the ‘therapeutic relationship’—not the specific things a therapist might say or do, but how you work together and the collaborative connection between you.
To give you a quick overview, here's a breakdown of the core principles of counselling and what they mean for you in practice.
Counselling at a Glance: Key Principles
These principles work together to create an environment where real change can happen.
Ultimately, counselling empowers you to look at things from new angles, develop better coping strategies, and make conscious choices that truly align with your values. By untangling complicated feelings and thoughts, you create the space for growth and a much deeper connection with yourself. To see how this unfolds, you might want to read our guide on what happens in counselling sessions, which offers a closer look at the structure and flow of a typical appointment.
The Real Goals of Therapy and Counselling
Many people think counselling is just a place to talk about problems or vent about a rough week. While that supportive conversation is definitely part of it, the real purpose of counselling is to create meaningful, lasting change in your life. It’s about moving beyond just talking and into doing.
Think of your life as a ship and you're the captain. Sometimes you might feel like you're sailing in circles, lost in a thick fog, or battling a current that just won't quit. A counsellor is like a skilled navigator. They don't take the wheel from you, but they help you read the charts, understand the weather patterns, and plot a clear course towards where you want to go.
Ultimately, the goal is to give you the skills to navigate on your own with more confidence and self-awareness. It's about building an internal toolkit you can carry with you long after our sessions have finished.
Building Robust Coping Strategies
Life is always going to throw challenges our way, from small daily stresses to major life events. A key goal of counselling isn't to get rid of stress—that’s impossible—but to change how you respond to it. Therapy helps you build a toolbox of healthy coping mechanisms so you don't feel so overwhelmed or fall back on old, unhelpful habits.
This could mean learning grounding techniques to manage anxiety as it happens, or developing better problem-solving skills to face difficult situations head-on. The idea is to shift from simply reacting to life to consciously and calmly responding to it.
The objective of therapy is not to fix you, because you are not broken. It is to help you build the self-awareness and resilience needed to face life's challenges with a stronger sense of self and purpose.
For instance, someone feeling the pressure at work might learn how to set firm boundaries, communicate their needs more clearly, and use mindfulness to head off burnout. These aren't just abstract concepts; they're practical, real-world skills for a more balanced life.
And the need for these skills is very real. Each year, roughly 1 in 4 adults in England experiences a mental health problem, which shows just how common these struggles are and why good support is so important.
Enhancing Your Relationships and Communication
Our connections with other people are central to our happiness, but they can also be a huge source of pain. Counselling offers a safe space—almost like a laboratory—to explore your patterns in relationships with partners, family, friends, and colleagues.
A major focus is often on improving communication. This isn't just about talking; it's about learning how to express your feelings and needs assertively and respectfully, rather than bottling them up or letting them out as anger. It also means learning how to truly listen to others with empathy, which helps build deeper, more authentic connections.
A couple might break a toxic cycle of blame and learn to have tough conversations with kindness and a real desire to understand each other. This is where personal growth directly improves the quality of your relationships. Exploring how therapy can help you grow in this way is a powerful step, and you can learn more about the role of therapy in personal development in our guide.
Safely Processing the Past
Our past experiences, especially the difficult or traumatic ones, can cast a long shadow over the present. They shape our beliefs and our behaviours, often keeping us stuck in painful patterns without us even realising why.
Another core goal of counselling is to create a secure environment where you can process these past events. With a trained professional guiding you, it’s possible to explore difficult memories and emotions without feeling overwhelmed. The aim isn't to erase the past, but to loosen its grip on your present and future.
This process helps you understand the roots of certain behaviours or emotional triggers. By making sense of your own story, you can start to heal old wounds, let go of beliefs that have been holding you back, and move forward with a real sense of freedom.
Finding Your Fit with Different Counselling Approaches
The world of therapy isn’t a "one-size-fits-all" solution. Just as we all have unique personalities and experiences, different counselling approaches have been developed to meet a huge variety of needs. Finding the right fit is less about picking the "best" one and more about discovering the method that really clicks with you and your personal goals.
Think of it like choosing a route for a long walk. One person might prefer a clearly marked, direct path with a specific destination in mind. Someone else might want a more exploratory route, allowing them to wander and discover the landscape at their own pace. Neither path is wrong; they just serve different purposes for different people.
Getting to grips with the main types of counselling on offer empowers you to make an informed choice. It helps you find a therapeutic style that feels comfortable and effective, setting the stage for a more rewarding journey.
Understanding Your Options: Person-Centred, CBT, and Psychodynamic Therapy
Three of the most established approaches you'll come across in the UK are Person-Centred Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and Psychodynamic Therapy. Each has a distinct focus and way of working, which means they suit different personalities and the challenges they bring.
Person-Centred Therapy: This approach is built on the belief that you are the expert on your own life. The counsellor’s role is to provide a supportive, non-judgemental, and empathetic space to help you explore your feelings and unlock your own potential for growth. It's less about the therapist giving advice and more about them helping you find your own answers. To learn more, you can read about **the key insights and benefits of Person-Centred Therapy** in our detailed guide.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): This is a much more structured and goal-oriented approach. CBT focuses directly on the connection between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. It helps you pinpoint unhelpful or negative thought patterns and gives you practical strategies to change them. This makes it particularly effective for specific issues like anxiety or phobias.
Psychodynamic Therapy: This style delves deeper into your past to understand how it’s influencing your present. It explores how unconscious thoughts and early experiences, especially from childhood, might be shaping your current behaviours and relationships. This can be incredibly powerful for getting to the root of recurring patterns you feel stuck in.
The image below shows how counselling can be structured not just by approach, but also by format to support individuals, couples, or groups.
This just goes to show that therapy can be tailored to best suit the relational dynamics you want to explore.
A Breath of Fresh Air: Walk-and-Talk Therapy
For some, the idea of sitting face-to-face in a quiet room can feel a bit intense or restrictive. If you're someone who thinks better while moving or finds nature calming, Walk-and-Talk therapy offers a brilliant alternative.
This approach combines the benefits of a traditional counselling session with the gentle, rhythmic act of walking. It can feel less formal and confrontational, often allowing conversation to flow more naturally. The simple act of moving forward physically can create a psychological sense of making progress and feeling less "stuck."
It’s an excellent option for anyone who feels anxious in enclosed spaces or simply wants to bring some gentle physical activity into their mental health care.
Choosing a therapeutic approach is deeply personal. The most important factor is finding a counsellor and a method that makes you feel safe, heard, and understood. The connection you build is the foundation for meaningful change.
To help you get a clearer picture of which approach might be right for you, this table breaks down the key differences.
Comparing Common Counselling Approaches
This table provides a simple comparison of different therapeutic modalities to help you understand which might be the best fit for your situation.
Ultimately, there is no hierarchy here. The best approach is simply the one that aligns with what you need right now. By understanding these options, you're better equipped to start a conversation with a potential counsellor and find a path that feels right for you.
What to Expect from Your First Counselling Session
Taking that first step into a counsellor's room can feel like a massive leap into the unknown. It’s completely normal to have a jumble of feelings – curiosity, a bit of hope, and maybe a healthy dose of nerves about what’s around the corner. The best way to ease those jitters is to pull back the curtain on the process. It’s not a clinical procedure; it's a supportive, human conversation.
The main goal of our first meeting is refreshingly simple: to see if we’re a good ‘fit’. This is your chance to get a sense of me and how I work, and for me to begin to understand what’s brought you here. Think of it less as diving into the deep end and more as just dipping your toes in the water to establish a foundation of trust and comfort.
This first meeting, which I often call an exploratory session, is very much a two-way street. It's your space to ask anything you like about the counselling process, my approach, or whatever else is on your mind. Feeling safe and understood is the bedrock of good therapy, and it all starts right here.
The Initial Consultation: A Shared Exploration
Our first session is more of a gentle introduction than an intense interrogation. There are no tests, no clipboards, no formal assessments. We’ll simply spend the time talking about what’s troubling you. My job is to listen—really listen—to understand your world from your perspective and create a space where you feel heard without any judgement.
I might ask a few more questions than in our later sessions, but only to get a clearer picture of your situation and what you're hoping for. We can talk about your goals, whether they’re specific, like finding ways to manage anxiety, or more general, like wanting to feel a greater sense of purpose in your life.
The first session is a shared exploration. It's not a performance where you need to have everything figured out. It’s perfectly okay to arrive with uncertainty; our work is to navigate it together.
This idea of a collaborative partnership is what makes counselling work. The growing demand for mental health support shows just how many people are looking for this kind of connection. In recent years, services in England have seen a record number of referrals, a huge jump from before the pandemic. It’s part of a wider trend where the number of adults using talking therapies has almost doubled in the last two decades. It shows just how central counselling has become to our wellbeing. You can dig into the numbers yourself in this mental health trends and data analysis from the BMA.
The Structure of a Typical Session
Once we decide to continue working together, our sessions will settle into a familiar rhythm, but one that is always led by you. While every conversation is unique, there are a few common elements you can expect from a standard 50-minute session.
A Gentle Beginning: We’ll start by checking in, seeing what's been on your mind since we last met or exploring what feels most present for you today.
A Client-Led Focus: You are always in the driver's seat. This is your time, and you decide what we focus on.
Collaborative Exploration: We’ll work together to explore your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, looking for patterns and uncovering new ways of seeing things.
A Thoughtful Closing: As our time draws to an end, we’ll gently wind down the conversation. We might summarise a key insight or identify something for you to reflect on before our next meeting.
This structure provides a reliable and safe container for our work. It gives you the freedom to explore whatever you need to, while also feeling held and supported. The focus is always on creating an environment where you feel empowered to find your own path forward, with me walking alongside you as a guide.
The Real-World Benefits of Therapy
Starting counselling is one of the best investments you can make in yourself. While most people first come to therapy to tackle a specific problem they're facing right now, the positive effects almost always ripple out much further than that initial goal. It’s not just about putting out fires; it’s about rebuilding your inner world to be more resilient, insightful, and genuinely you.
Think of it like tending to a garden. You might start by pulling a few obvious weeds that are causing trouble, but the real, lasting work comes from enriching the soil, understanding the unique climate of your own life, and learning what helps everything flourish. The benefits of therapy work in the same way – they create deep, foundational changes that support your growth long after our sessions have finished.
These shifts touch every part of your life. From the way you see yourself to how you connect with the people around you, the clarity you find in counselling can reshape your entire experience of the world for the better.
Gaining Emotional Resilience and Self-Compassion
One of the most powerful changes people experience is a huge boost in their resilience. Life is full of unexpected twists and turns, and therapy gives you the tools to handle those ups and downs with a greater sense of stability. You learn how to bend without breaking, managing stress and setbacks without feeling like you've been completely knocked off course.
Hand-in-hand with resilience comes self-compassion. Let's be honest, many of us have a harsh inner critic that never seems to switch off, fuelling feelings of shame or not being good enough. Counselling is a dedicated space to finally challenge that voice and start replacing it with a kinder, more understanding perspective.
Learning to treat yourself with the same kindness you’d offer a good friend is a complete game-changer. It gives you permission to be imperfect without judging yourself for it, which is the bedrock of genuine self-acceptance and confidence.
Improving Your Relationships and Boundaries
The work we do in therapy doesn’t just stay in the therapy room; it radiates out into your relationships. When you start to understand your own patterns, needs, and emotional triggers, you get much better at communicating them to others. This naturally leads to healthier, more honest connections with partners, family, and friends.
A huge piece of this puzzle is learning to set and maintain healthy boundaries.
Boundaries aren't about pushing people away. They’re about clearly defining what’s okay for you, making sure your relationships are built on respect and are a two-way street.
This might look like learning to say "no" without feeling guilty, protecting your time and energy, or calmly stating your needs during a disagreement.
Understanding yourself is the first step to being understood by others. Counselling provides the clarity needed to build relationships on a foundation of mutual respect and genuine connection, rather than unspoken expectations.
By improving your ability to connect authentically while protecting your own wellbeing, you begin to create relationships that feel supportive and energising, rather than draining.
Finding Clarity and a Renewed Sense of Purpose
Beyond just managing difficulties, one of the most profound benefits of counselling is gaining a clearer view of your life as a whole. When you’re stuck in the middle of daily stress, it’s incredibly easy to lose sight of what truly matters to you. The reflective space therapy provides allows you to take a step back and see the bigger picture.
This process often helps you reconnect with your core values and passions. You might rediscover a dream you’d long forgotten, find the confidence to make a big life change, or simply find deeper meaning in your current circumstances. This renewed sense of direction can be a powerful source of motivation and fulfilment.
Ultimately, this is what counselling is all about: helping you live more consciously. It’s about shifting from a life of automatic reactions to one of intentional choices, creating a future that feels authentically yours.
How to Find the Right Counsellor in Cheltenham
Deciding to start counselling is a big deal, and finding the right person to take that journey with you is just as crucial. Cheltenham has plenty of qualified professionals, but the real task is finding someone who just feels right for you. It’s less about checking boxes and more about finding a real human connection.
Think of it like choosing a guide for an important expedition. You’d obviously want someone with the right training and experience, but you’d also need to trust them. You'd want someone whose presence makes you feel safe, understood, and confident about the path ahead. That relationship you build with your counsellor is the bedrock of everything you'll do together.
Starting Your Search with Confidence
First things first, you need to know you’re in safe hands. Before you go any further, check that any potential counsellor is professionally qualified and accountable. Look for membership in a recognised professional body, like the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) or the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP).
This isn’t just red tape; it's a guarantee that they work to strict ethical standards and a professional code of conduct. It’s your peace of mind.
Once you’ve confirmed their credentials, it's time to focus on something more personal: the ‘therapeutic fit’. This is all about the rapport and trust you feel with a counsellor. Study after study has shown this connection is one of the biggest factors in whether therapy is successful. Because it's so personal, it's a great idea to speak with a few different counsellors before you commit. Most, myself included, offer a free initial chat for this very reason.
Choosing a counsellor is a deeply personal decision. There's no league table of 'best' therapists—only the one who is the best fit for you. Trust your gut instinct; that intuitive sense of connection is often a reliable guide.
Questions to Ask a Potential Counsellor
That initial chat is a two-way street. It’s your chance to interview them, just as much as it is for them to get to know you. Having a few questions ready can help you get a feel for their style and whether it lines up with what you need.
Here are a few good questions to have in your back pocket:
How would you describe your approach to counselling? This helps you figure out if they stick to a particular method, like Person-Centred or Psychodynamic, and whether that sounds like your cup of tea.
What’s your experience with the kinds of issues I'm facing? It’s not essential for them to be a ‘specialist’, but it can be really reassuring to know they've walked this path with others before.
What can I expect from our first few sessions? This gives you a practical idea of how they work and what those early stages might actually feel like.
How do you see the client-counsellor relationship? Their answer will tell you a lot about whether they view the process as a collaborative partnership, which is exactly what you want.
This isn’t an interrogation, it’s just a conversation to see if you click. Finding the right counsellor in Cheltenham is the first, most important step on a really rewarding journey of self-discovery and growth.
Your Top Questions about Starting Counselling
Stepping into therapy often brings a mix of hope and apprehension. It's completely normal to have questions swirling around your head – sometimes, these queries are the last little hurdle before you pick up the phone. Getting clear answers can demystify the whole process and make taking that first step feel much more manageable.
Here are some of the most common things people ask when they're thinking about counselling. My hope is that these straightforward answers give you the clarity you need to move forward with confidence.
How Long Does Counselling Take to Make a Difference?
There’s no magic number here, because therapy is such a personal experience. For some, short-term counselling of around 6-12 sessions works wonders for tackling a specific issue. For others, longer-term work is more beneficial for exploring deeper, more ingrained patterns of feeling and behaviour.
The most important thing is that the pace always feels right for you. A good counsellor will collaborate with you to set goals and regularly check in on your progress, making sure the timeline fits your unique needs.
Is What I Say in Therapy Truly Confidential?
Yes, absolutely. Confidentiality is the bedrock of the therapeutic relationship. Everything you share is kept private and secure, which is what creates the safe space you need to be truly open and honest. It’s a fundamental part of a counsellor's ethical code.
The only time this would ever change is if there's a serious concern that you or someone else – particularly a child – is at immediate risk of significant harm. This is a standard legal and ethical requirement to ensure safety, and your counsellor will explain it clearly in your very first session.
Think of confidentiality as a secure container for your thoughts and feelings. It's what allows you to explore sensitive topics freely, knowing that your vulnerability will be respected and protected throughout the entire process.
What if I Don’t Know What to Talk About?
This is such a common worry, and it’s completely okay. You don't need to show up with a perfectly prepared speech or a neat list of problems. In fact, some of the most powerful sessions start with, "I'm not sure what to say today."
A skilled counsellor is trained to help you gently explore your thoughts and feelings, even when you feel stuck or unsure where to start. It's their job to help guide the conversation, not to judge your performance. Often, simply sitting with the uncertainty is where the most profound insights emerge.
Do I Need to Be in Crisis to Go to Counselling?
Not at all. While counselling is a vital lifeline during a crisis, it's also an incredibly powerful tool for proactive self-care and personal growth. Many people come to therapy to navigate big life changes, improve their relationships, or build resilience before things feel overwhelming.
Think of it less like an emergency repair service and more like essential maintenance for your mental and emotional wellbeing. It’s a genuine investment in yourself and your future.
If you're in Cheltenham and feel ready to explore what counselling is and how it could support you, Therapy with Ben is here to help. Please visit https://www.therapy-with-ben.co.uk to learn more or to book an initial chat.
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