AN OVERVIEW OF THE FIELD OF THERAPY

THE HELPING PROFESSIONAL

Professionals in the fields of counseling and psychotherapy have a wide range of different backgrounds and perspectives.

They can be broken down into these categories:

  • Social work counselors: counselors for individuals; marriage and family counselors; group counselors; and vocational guidance counselors
  • Psychologists: clinical psychologists; counseling psychologists; and psychometrists
  • Psychiatrists
  • Other therapists: religious counselors; biofeedback therapists; hypnotherapists; relaxation and meditation instructors; holistic therapists such as bioenergetics therapists, yoga instructors, and exercise therapists; etc.

The education, supervised training, and outlooks of these professionals vary greatly, as do their fees and the average length of time therapy can be expected to last.

THE RANGE OF APPROACHES TO THERAPY

Because of their differences in training and personal or theoretical preferences, the distinct classes of therapists represent a diversity of approaches to therapy.

There are numerous schools of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, behavioral therapy, group therapy, and marriage and family therapy, and a range of approaches to personal adjustment, including exercise therapies, relaxation techniques, forms of meditation, and drug and nutrition therapies.

From any one of these, a multitude of schools of thought branches out. For example, psychoanalysis has, since Freud, developed along a number of different lines: each major psychoanalyst has formulated his or her own approach to analysis that distinguishes itself from Freud’s. Psychotherapy, to take another example, is not a single approach to therapy, but rather makes up an entire field. It is the largest and most rapidly growing area relating to mental health. In it are included distinct approaches, such as client-centered therapy, Gestalt therapy, transactional analysis, rational-emotive therapy, existential-humanistic therapy, reality therapy, logotherapy, Adlerian therapy, emotional flooding therapies, and direct decision therapy.

The goal will be to enable you to understand enough about each of the major therapies to make an informed decision in choosing an approach (and there may be more than one) that will be most useful in relation to your own understanding of your objectives, whether they are long-range or focused on the need to eliminate immediate obstacles to growth.




 

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COUNSELING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

Counseling and psychotherapy have developed a great deal in recent years–so much so that their boundaries have often overlapped. Clear-cut distinctions between the two fields are increasingly hard to draw. Nevertheless, some professionals prefer to call themselves by one name and some by the other.

In general terms, counseling tends to be a short-term process the purpose of which is to help the client, couple, or family overcome specific problems and eliminate blocks to growth. Counseling gives individuals a chance to resolve personal problems and concerns.

Most counselors attempt to help their clients become aware of a widened range of possibilities of choice; from this perspective, counseling tries to free clients from rigid patterns of habit. Habits can be useful, but they can also interfere with life.

The technical habits of a pianist, for example, are essential in performance. Similarly, only when language skills become habitual does a speaker of a foreign language achieve command of it. On the other hand, fears can also become habitual, and they may come to interfere with everyday activities. Anxiety over public speaking may become habitual.

There are many personally destructive habits–alcoholism, smoking, over- or under-eating, abusive behavior, shyness and social withdrawal–and all can become self-perpetuating patterns. Counseling can help people break out of these habits, often in part by helping clients become aware of unrecognized alternatives.

Psychotherapy tends to be more concerned than counseling with fundamental personality-structure changes. Frequently, psychotherapy is a longer-term process. Frequently, too, the problems treated in psychotherapy are hard to pin down and are less specific. They include chronic depression, pervasive (“free-floating”) anxiety, generalized lack of self-esteem, and so on. Such difficulties are not well defined; their causes may be vague or uncertain, and often much time must be spent to get at their basis.

Psychotherapy seeks to bring about an intensive self-awareness of the  inner dynamics–the internal forces and the principles that govern them–that are involved in chronic forms of personal distress. Sometimes, as in analytical psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, attention is focused on the role of unconscious processes in inner conflicts; treatment attempts to resolve these conflicts by understanding the unconscious forces involved.

The term psychotherapy is often used to imply more advanced professional training, whereas counseling is something individuals with more modest academic credentials may practice. Whether a professional is called a counselor or a therapist has to do with his or her level of training, with the setting in which services are offered, and, to a certain degree, with that person’s theoretical orientation.

In practice, these differences in outlook frequently amount to differences in emphasis rather than approach.

Generally, and from this point on, I will speak of counseling and psychotherapy interchangeably unless there is a need to be especially restrictive.

 

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