Most people come to counseling with feelings of helplessness.
Of course, these feelings generate a great deal of pain and discomfort! Bad things have been happening to them.
Initially, counseling provides needed support for the client. However, in the best case outcome counseling leads the client to discover and develop the resources to effect changes for him or himself.
At the foundation of all good counseling is the idea that you can change things, including yourself! If you have an intolerable situation, habit, or feeling in your life, what makes you think things will become better if you do nothing?
If you continue doing what you've been doing, you can expect to get more of what you've been getting! Counseling requires a belief in the possibility of change. Counseling proposes that you cannot always just just let things happen to you, but you must become active in controlling your own surroundings and future to make things happen for you.
Most people have more options than they are ready to admit. A good counselor will help the client see that he or she is not really "boxed in." Once the client develops this creative, option-based way of thinking, he or she will be able to uses it again and again in the future.
Counseling embraces the wonder of change. Ultimately, behaviors, thinking, and feelings can be changed. In short, people can and do change for the better! I like to believe that I have effected personal changes for the better; I know that many of my friends have!
If people could not change, the whole world would be helpless. However, they can and do, that is the message of God, and He promises to help us. Counseling is exciting because it puts you on the road to discovery.
No wonder that Jesus was called The Wonderful Counselor (Isaiah 9:6). The ability to effect change restores feeling of control. Sometimes you have to change things for yourself!