If you’re confused about how counseling works, the following analogy might help to clarify a few things:
Architects design houses, not homes; homes are what people create, or fail to create, out of houses. Similarly, psychotherapists provide conversations, not cures; “cures” (of souls, now called “successful psychotherapies”) are what clients who engage in such conversations create, or fail to create, out of their contacts with their psychotherapists.
– Thomas Szasz1
In short, counseling is a collaborative process. Rather than passively receiving a ‘cure’, clients must play an active role in their pursuit of change.
Even if counselors could provide blanket solutions or ‘cures’, it would not necessarily be in their clients’ best interest to do so. Counselors who allow clients to become passively dependent deprive them of opportunities to develop their own solutions to problems.
The counselor’s goal is really to become redundant, by helping clients get to a place wherein they no longer need professional support; they have developed a set of tools to address their issues and know how and when to apply them, independently.
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As a bonus, here is psychologist Jordan B. Peterson’s take on therapy. I have criticised aspects of Peterson’s 12 Rules in the past, but wholeheartedly approve this message:
Psychotherapy is not advice. Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems.
Psychotherapy is genuine conversation. Genuine conversation is exploration, articulation and strategizing. When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening, and talking—but mostly listening. Listening is paying attention. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you listen. Sometimes if you listen to people they will even tell you what’s wrong with them. Sometimes they will even tell you how they plan to fix it. Sometimes that helps you fix something wrong with yourself.2
For more on this topic, check out the article Choosing a Counselor.
