How Counselling Theory Helps Individuals Understand Themselves

This article discusses how counselling theory helps individuals understand themselves by providing insight into their personalities, behaviour, and emotions. It explains how being knowledgeable about the mind can lead to positive changes in one's life.

Counselling is one of the best careers that an individual could undertake. It is good in
the sense that a counsellor establishes a helping relationship with their clients which lead to
great improvements in the health and well being of those clients. In addition to this,
counselling theory helps an individual understand themselves and appreciate why people are
so different. This is both in terms of their thought processes and behaviour. This discussion is
going to focus on how counselling theory helps an individual understand themselves. In
addition, some example to demonstrate this will also be provided.
When interacting with counselling theory, an individual gets insight in to how certain
things happen or why certain things happen the way that they do. For instance, one
appreciates that different people have different personalities and therefore the approach to
each client should be customized to meet their unique needs. When a counsellor is learning
about personalities, they get a chance reflect about themselves and know which personalities
they have. This is a very important since with an understanding of their personalities,
counsellors are more likely to be effective in their counselling endeavours.
Counselling theory also attempts to explain the psychology of behaviour. Behaviour is
key in counselling. Most of the times, counselling sessions are intended to do away with a
certain behaviour, adopt a new behaviour or some modification of behaviour. When learning
about behaviour, an individual gets to understand why they possess certain behaviours and
not others and how to modify them if necessary. For example, one may understand that the
reason why they are addicted to taking sweet foods is because of the brain reward system.
The neurotransmitter dopamine is usually released when something perceived as good by the
brain is taken. Therefore, an individual will continually do that which leads to rewarding
which leads to addiction.

Through counselling theory, one also learns about emotions and how to be
emotionally intelligent. If someone experiences certain emotions in a way that is not normal,
they are likely to understand the reason why that happens. In addition, they are likely to learn
ways of improving. An example would be a person who went through a traumatizing
situation. This individual might be chronically sad. Counselling theory may help them
understand the reason why they are chronically sad and what could be done to change the
situation. Counselling borrows greatly from the field of psychology. Psychology is the study
of mental processes. The mind is the origin of all thoughts and ideas and therefore being
knowledgeable about it will help a person understand themselves.
In conclusion, counselling can be though of as one of the best careers since it helps
impact the lives of people in positive ways. Through counselling theory, one can understand
themselves. For instance, one understands their personalities and why they are unique from
others. A person is also able to know why they behave the way that they do and potential
ways of modifying behaviour if need be.