‘counseling: who needs such a thing?‘ This is about the view some veteran personalities express when the issue comes to psychotherapy or counseling. psychotherapy still has a dubious image – people who need it would have to be losers or people who don’t have control over their lives.

But a look outside the box shows that in progressive and self-critical, competitive societies, approaches such as psychotherapy, coaching or counseling are well accepted aids in difficult situations of life. Celebrities talk openly about how they learned more about themselves in psychotherapy, and managers report about achieving new momentum through coaching on a regular basis for their challenging job.

To see the potential of counseling, one has to understand that a person’s ability to help and ‘advise’ herself is actually quite limited. Each of us has a very personal way to deal with problems: again and again we apply pretty much the same strategies – and even if they fail, most of us tend to just try harder, even at the risk of a disaster. Counseling and therapy however primarily bring in neutral and unbiased feedback from a professional not stuck in the dilemma – often, he can also introduce new perspectives and establish new and creative ways of dealing with the challenge to ease overcoming the obstacles for a solution.
In this sense, seeking counseling, coaching or psychotherapy is a sign of foresight and intelligence: that someone considers himself and his life so valuable that he no longer accepts feeling unhappy or wastes time by just relying on his own ways of thinking.

(This short article is part of a weekly series dealing with psychological expat problems and general mental health issues and was published in various newspapers and magazines in Thailand, 2010)