Why counselling and traditional psychotherapy don’t work.

Blaming your anxiety:

During a 12-week counselling programme you talk about the problem. Looking back through your past to find the answer. Blaming your anxiety on your dads drinking, or your binge eating on the fact your Gran fed you too many sweets. Trying to find the answer for the state of your current mental health and the reason you sabotage every new relationship you have; don’t think you are good enough and get angry so easily. Drudging through all the past pain, reliving it trying to find blame.

Do this for a minute for me………think back to a conversation you have had this week with your best friend or your partner……..a conversation you were having about a past event….. A day ago or a week ago…….you were moaning….you were talking negatively……how much your Mother in law had upset you off or how rude your boss was to you, telling them AAALLLL about it in every fine detail. Take yourself back there right now. How did you feel? What emotions were in your body? What were your facial expressions? And what was your friend saying back? How did they look and act? Tense agitated and angry I bet.

How do you feel right now playing that event back? sad, anxious?

You see when we go back over our past, we relive the event. We go through it all over again. The mind is the most incredible machine, but it is stupid that way. It can’t distinction between what is real and what is imagined. So, in counselling sessions and in any therapy sessions that take you back over your past they are making you feel worse rather than better. That negative conversation with your best mate! It did the same. The tense conversation with your colleague about what happened yesterday- that did the same.

Just like modern technology has come on leaps and bounds so too has the way we must manage our mental health.   The old analytical way of psychoanalysis which was developed by the work of Sigmund Freud has a lot to answer for in regards the state of the populations mental health today.

It labels people with problems and issues and often relies on pharmaceutical intervention to support this.  For the past one hundred years we have been taught to believe that we need to go over our past in order to heal. That we are broken and that we must understand why to move forward.

That we ARE depression, anxiety and stress. That we ARE a result of our upbringing and past. Its just not true.

Talking about your problems is not the solution:

The solution is a solution-focused approach. When you learn how to decode your patterns of thinking and behaviour. Where you understand how your brain works and you are encouraged to work out your own preferred future.  Where YOU are in control not your past experiences.

If you'd like to know more about combating your anxiety then check out my resources, memberships, 1:1's etc HERE.