Many clients ask us to explain the difference between psychotherapy and counselling. It’s a great question, so here’s a overview of the key differences. If you have any questions after reading the article or wonder whether counselling or psychotherapy may be helpful for you, please feel free to reach out to us at contact@connectcounselling.clinic and we will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Counselling:
Counselling is generally understood to be a series of conversations through which clients find solutions to one problem at a time, via logical thinking. A counsellor uses empathy to connect with the client to bring about greater trust so that details of concerns can be shared for collaborative solutioning. Counselling consultation is typically short-term ranging between 6-12 one-hour sessions. The focus is on present issues that are resolved on the conscious level. In other words, counselling is more concerned with practical or immediate issues and outcomes. This could involve helping a client process intense emotions such as grief or anger, deal with immediate causes of stress and anxiety, clarify values and identify options when making important personal or professional decisions, manage conflicts within relationships, develop better interpersonal and communication skills, or to intentionally change unproductive thoughts and behaviours. The process or steps applied are clearly evident and transparent to clients.
Psychotherapy:
Psychotherapy, on the other hand, typically deals with longer-term treatment of 12 to 24 one-hour sessions or more, and focuses on gaining insight into chronic psychological and emotional problems. Psychotherapy intensively and extensively examines a person’s psychological history to seek deeper understanding of the client’s dynamics of thinking, feeling and acting. This is an evolutionary process that helps a person look at long-standing attitudes, thoughts, and behaviours that have resulted in the current quality of one’s life and relationships. It goes much deeper to uncover the root causes of problems, resulting in more dramatic changes in perspective regarding oneself, one’s life experience, and the world in general. Ultimately, psychotherapy aims to empower the individual by freeing the client from the grip of unconscious triggers or impulses through increased self-awareness.
People with chronic, more severe depression or anxiety, relational malfunctioning, or personality difficulties benefit most from psychotherapy. Many such difficulties originate from traumatic experiences, such as abuses earlier in life. While a psychotherapist is qualified to provide counselling, a counsellor may or may not possess the necessary training and skills to provide psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy goes deep to reveal the root cause that creates the related disturbed perspective of life. The client obtains relief by taking control of their life by developing self-awareness and executing actions to adjust behaviours, rather than living driven by unconscious impulses and stimulations. A major approach of psychotherapy is the exercising of the transference and countertransference phenomena to effect corrective experiences. For instance, the client may unconsciously associate a person in the present with a past relationship, and this results in a repetitive display of reactions that are not based on current reality. In this regard, a client may meet a psychotherapist who unconsciously reminds them of a former lover, family member, friend or colleague. The psychotherapist would then leverage on any countertransference, that is the effects that the client creates, to skillfully respond to the client and bring about corrective experiences, and so to liberate them from past fixations and relational patterns.
