What is Counseling? - GAY MEN'S COUNSELING

What is counseling? | How does counseling help? | The counseling process| Couples counseling

Counseling is a special category of human relationship that aims to help you manage your problems.

Your counselor works to understand not only your concerns but also the thoughts, habits, attitudes and assumptions that drive and maintain them.

Even more significantly than exploring deficits, your counselor also focuses on what is right about your life, pointing out overlooked strengths and resources that you can apply to your problems.

Above all, your counselor encourages you to distinguish your own wishes and feelings from attitudes you have probably inherited from others. Your counselor encourages you to focus on your actual experience rather than on what you may believe you ought to be thinking and feeling. And your counselor tries to listen without interference, almost as if walking in your shoes.

When you are clearer about where you stand and what you want, you will find it easier to manage problems and accomplish life-enhancing changes.

Your counselor will help you develop an action plan based on strategies to interrupt negative patterns and also to build on positive but possibly unnoticed behaviors that are already working for you. And your counselor will encourage you to persist in achieving your goals and then to maintain them.