Working with a counselor brings many benefits to your life. Read below for a few of the ways counseling can benefit you.
Decrease emotional distress
The counseling axiom,“You can’t heal what you don’t feel,” perfectly describes the counseling goal of decreasing emotional distress (Bradshaw). By feeling deep emotions in the presence of another compassionate person, emotional distress heals for most people most of the time.
Improves emotional fluency and develops empathy
Emotional fluency is the art of accurately naming internal states in self and others. The work of Dan Siegel expanded upon the ability of emotional fluency to decrease the stress of certain emotions by 50% by naming them accurately (Seigel). Developing skills and habits around emotional fluency helps increase wellbeing over time.
Increase coping skills and distress tolerance
In the counseling room, we cannot always change life stressors that clients are experiencing. However, we can utilize coping skills to decrease the stressors impact on the client.
Connect clients with a coherent sense of narrative
By working to place life events into a narrative or story, clients experience a deeper understanding of themselves as well as different views of how their personality interacts with their environment in adaptive and maladaptive ways. Additionally, working through narratives can help clients uncover hidden or deeply ingrained negative core beliefs that are unknowingly adding to emotional distress.
Learn new communication skills like assertiveness and boundary setting
Clients often take new insights and old communication patterns into account and discover the need for new ways of communicating. They can be applied as new physical, emotional, spiritual, or financial boundaries. Working through boundaries in the context of the counseling relationship allows for an objective perspective wherein unknown patterns become known.
If you would like to schedule a free discovery visit (telehealth or in person) with one of our counselors in Waco, please call/text 254-892-4957 or click here to schedule online.
