COUNSELING VS THERAPY: What is the difference?

 So what’s the difference when someone says to you “I am going to therapy”, or “I am seeing a counselor” or “I am doing therapy” or yet again “I am seeking counseling”. With over 400 official therapeutic modalities recognised by some federation or other institution just in the field of mental health, there can be no shortness of confusion among consumers. Actually, at this point it’s getting pretty confusing for us professionals too.

  So let us focus on a few key terms here, one at a time. 

Therapy

 Generally speaking the term therapy is used colloquially as short form for psychotherapy, and it often implies you seeing someone to get better in a general emotional sense. Through the conversations we have with our clients, people like myself hope to allow client’s mental or emotional distress to dissipate and become more manageable. That’s therapy. Or else said, that’s therapeutic. By giving unconditional empathy and positive regard, genuine reflections and skill building suggestions, we, as mental health professionals, allow therapeutic processes to take place. If we listen to the research through genuine, open, reflective and honest conversations, clients of talk-therapists live a more fulfilled life. Moving on, let’s speak of talk-Therapy now. 

Talk Therapy

I am a mental health counselor who provides talk-therapy. The term ‘Talk’ simply indicates that the main instrument of therapy here is talking. It differentiates talk-therapy from let’s say massage-therapy, or thermal-waters therapy, or nutritional therapies. In other words, among the thousands, if not millions of ways we can experience a therapeutic process, only some are based on talking, and as a talk-therapist I provide therapy through talking. This is true for all talk-therapy professionals out there, which includes psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, clinical social workers, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse and a few more. These professionals all use talking as a therapeutic instrument, but do so in different ways, contexts or settings, and with the support or not of medication. Lastly counseling.

Counseling

Counseling is a relatively recent word in the field of talk-therapy, and it is being used more and more simply because of where, and a little bit how, the talk-therapist is being trained. From an historical perspective we all descend from Freudian psychoanalysis, the founding father of talk-therapy. But psychoanalysis was very rooted in the German environment, and when it got to the USA after the second world war, it developed into new things, new forms and approaches that professionals of that time called psychotherapy. Recently the field of talk-therapy, which is always linked to research in psychology, has undergone further changes, and what we call third-wave therapists are often times now being called counsellors. What counselors, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts have in common is the reference they make to psychology research, and their intention to remain rooted in science. What they are different in, is the way in which they deliver and use that knowledge in the talk-therapy process, the way in which they share their authority and decisional power, and the way in which they prioritize this or other technique over say, the client’s present needs. 

Look after your Heart,

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