Verbal Abuse Counselor

How can I get the most out of counseling?
Counseling is a process of learning, so the same methods that would help you get the most out of a class will help you get the most out of counseling.● Work at remembering what goes on during the therapy session. Bring a notepad and take notes on what the counselor says. Some counselors will print specific notes out from their computer, or they will have a handout with the information to give you. Most counselors will allow you to record the therapy session. Ask first and then bring in a recording device so you don’t need to stop a session to take notes. Just remember not to leave incriminating tapes around your house. After the therapy session, write down the things you learned that you think were most important for you. Reread your notes, or play the tape during the week between sessions to remind you of things you’d like to think about.
● Do homework or exercises between sessions to help you learn more. If you’re working on being more outgoing, decide on a small step you can take in that direction between therapy sessions. For example, decide that you’re going to introduce yourself to one stranger every day this week at work. Take notes on what your goal was, how you worked on it, and what barriers you couldn’t overcome that week and want to talk about. Ask your therapist to help you plan homework or exercises between sessions. The therapist doesn’t think like you, so she will probably come up with something you didn’t think of yourself. Make sure the homework or exercise isn’t too big a step for you to take all at once. Maybe there’s a book you can read about the issue or a biography of a person who overcame this handicap. Maybe there’s a self-help book or a book of programmed instruction that you can use between sessions to increase your learning. Ask the therapist what books she recommends for you. Check the library or look up second-hand books online to keep the cost affordable.
● Keep a journal or diary of your experiences. A personal journal is a major help to you when you’re trying to increase your learning. Pick a time that is good for you, relax over a cup of tea or a glass of wine, and just write about yourself and the thoughts and feelings running through your head. What happened in your day and how did you feel about it? What did that event remind you of in your past or how did it worry you about your future?
What happens in counseling?
Generally, you’ll fill out the information about yourself first, as you would for any doctor, and you’ll receive information about the counselor. Hopefully, you will learn about her employment history and some information about how she was trained and what problems she likes to work with. If you’ve ‘interviewed’ the counselor by phone first, you’ll probably have a good start on that already.
In the first session, your counselor will ask you to talk about the issue that brings you into counseling, and you’ll describe that in your own words. You’ll probably discuss it in detail with the counselor and you’ll get a chance to see how the counselor thinks about things, and how she works with you. Probably you’ll also be asked some standard background questions about your schooling, your medical history, your family, and your current circumstances. You’ll probably talk about what your goals are for counseling, that is, what you want to change about yourself and about your life. Often the goals will take the form of new skills you want to learn. For example, you may want to be able to handle your mother better when she visits you, or you may want to learn to understand your past better.
After the first session, you’ll probably want to talk about events from the previous week that relate to your goals or thoughts and feelings you’ve had that you want to talk over and understand better. You may want advice about how to handle specific issues in your daily life or you may want support for the progress you’ve made in achieving your goals. You won’t necessarily ‘feel good’ after each session, but you should ‘feel good about the session.’ You should feel that you were heard, that the counselor was on your side and wanted you to achieve your goals. You should think that the counselor was knowledgeable about your problem and that she was contributing to you solving it during the session. The counselor might point out things you already knew or share his or her own thoughts. Above all, you should feel hope that you can achieve your goals, if not today, at a foreseeable time in the future.
The therapy ends when you decide you’ve achieved your goals. Or perhaps when you decide you’ve benefited as much from talking to this counselor as you’re likely to. If you have big ambitions and smaller resources, maybe therapy ends when your reimbursement for therapy from your insurance runs out. For some people, therapy lasts for years and involves major changes in their life circumstances or in their ways of dealing with issues. For other people, therapy lasts just a few sessions until the specific issue they talk about has been resolved.
Some people see a therapist only once and leave because they didn’t think it helped them. Oddly enough, the research says that those people were helped by that single contact even though they didn’t think it was helpful!
Is all counseling the same?
No, because all counselors are different.
There is such a thing as a good counselor. Probably most counselors are good at what they do. But you’re not just looking for a good counselor. You’re looking for a good counselor for you. You want a good fit with a counselor, and that has to do with two things, what the counselor is like and what you are like.
● Some counselors are very supportive and empathetic and show that to their patients or clients. Others are more aloof and “professional”.
● Some counselors are more judgmental than other counselors about issues that are controversial in the culture – like abortion or homosexuality or child-rearing. They may be more inclined to share their personal feelings or judgments about these issues.
● Some counselors are more knowledgeable than others about biological issues – like pain or head injury. Or they may know more about a specialty area like eating disorders or sexual enrichment counseling. Not all counselors are experts in all things.
● Some ‘counselors’ are not actually experts at counseling. They may be experts at prescribing medications, or psychological testing or doing biofeedback for stress management. A psychiatrist may be trained to prescribe medications, for example, but may not be as good at helping his or her patients learn to adjust to difficult circumstances or recover from past traumatic events as a social worker. And someone who’s an expert at diagnosing difficulties to present to the court may not be as skilled at treating those difficulties.
● Some counselors are very structured and like to set goals formally, give you homework to work on, and take an active part in helping you work toward your goals. These counselors may give you advice and instruction. They may provide written handouts, and recommend books to you. Other counselors are more informal, and respond each week to what you bring in, leaving you to set the agenda and expecting that you are working in the best way to get your needs met as long as you are returning for the next session. They may reflect back your own thoughts more and insert themselves and their opinions less into the counseling session.
● You probably can’t judge how good counselors are by the degree they hold. Psychiatrists are the most expensive of the mental health professionals, but research says that they aren’t necessarily better at counseling than psychologists, social workers, or mental health counselors.
I have real physical problems. How could talking to a counselor help with those?
The mind and body are intimately connected. You live through events and have thoughts and feelings that constantly affect your body in positive and negative ways. We even talk about our feelings in a physical way. We shake with fear, get a dry mouth from stage fright, blush with shame and get a sinking feeling in our stomach from guilt. We say that difficult encounters with people give us a headache.

Our body comes complete with an emergency response system, the Autonomic Nervous System. When we think something is dangerous our body prepares for “fight, flight or freeze.” We aren’t born knowing what is dangerous, however. We rely on our brain, our thoughts, to tell us what and where the danger is. Even though we aren’t really expecting our boss to physically strike us, our brain tells us that when the boss is angry, we are in danger, so our bodies make preparations like tensing muscles, drying our mouth, stopping our digestive processes. All of those are real physical reactions to a real danger.

Our emergency response system is wonderfully efficient, and hard to fool. You can tell yourself you aren’t nervous about an upcoming job interview, but you will probably have a dry mouth anyway, no matter what you say to yourself. In fact, not paying attention to your nervousness makes the physical problems worse. You may tell yourself you’re calm, cool, and collected about an upcoming stressful event, but your emergency response system may still be ringing all the alarm bells. And because you don’t think you should be nervous or upset, you won’t act in ways to reduce your stress because you think you shouldn’t be having it in the first place! It’s hard to fix something when you don’t think it’s broken.

But our bodies are really built for sudden emergencies that disappear very rapidly – like the appearance of a saber-toothed cat ahead of us that we can outrun. The emergency response is built-in, but calming ourselves down after the danger has passed isn’t automatic. And what if the danger never passes? What if the boss is always angry, or always angry at you, or what if the boss is unpredictable and inconsistent? And it’s worse if you learned as a child that an angry parent meant a hurtful parent.

And that’s why talk therapy can help with physical problems. Our thoughts, feelings, and experiences, can cause physical problems, or make them worse. If you blush when someone tells a dirty joke, you know you’ve had a physical reaction to a mental event. If there were some reason that blushing was bad for your body and it got worse over time, you might want to learn not to have a blushing reaction. There would be two ways to go about this. (1) You could learn to consider talking or joking about sex not embarrassing, and that’s exactly the sort of learning you do in talk therapy, or (2) you could learn not to have a face-flushing reaction when you’re embarrassed, and that’s also possible in talk therapy by some mind-body methods like relaxation or biofeedback.

Let’s assume you had a shoulder injury in a car crash. You have real pain from that injury, and it doesn’t seem to go away over time. How can talk therapy help with pain? Counseling helps in those same two ways. (1) You can learn to focus on the things that are stressful and bother you, and work through them mentally so you solve the unsolved issues that are causing you to tense up and make your pain worse, and (2) you can reduce the pain directly by learning to relax, including even relaxing the shoulder when you’re in pain. Either or both of these methods can reduce your very real physical pain. Most people underestimate how big an effect the mind has on the body in everyday life. Pain isn’t ‘all in your head’ but your head can certainly do a big job of managing it.
Is talking to a counselor any different than talking to a friend?
Yes, it is.

Talking to a friend should be a positive experience. You probably “vent” to a friend when something stressful happens to you, or ask for advice if you don’t know what to do. You expect your friend to support you with positive comments and if they have expertise in some area, for example, car repair or knitting, you probably expect good advice when you ask for it. You expect to return the favor and pay your friend back by listening, supporting, and advising your friend equally in other areas or at other times. Talking to friends and family, and having friends and family to talk to, is some of the most important predictors of happiness. People who don’t have a good support network of friends and family are usually less healthy, less happy, and less stable when life throws them a curve.

On the other hand, talking to a friend or family member has some limitations:

● If you’re going through a particularly bad time, for example going through a divorce, you may find that you only want to talk about your problems and your negative feelings. Your friends and family may start to avoid you because you “bring them down.” No friend is able to listen to negative things forever without having their own negative feelings about what you’re talking about.

● Friends or family members probably have an angle, an idea of what they think you ought to do or how you ought to proceed. For example, if you separate from your partner, maybe they think you should go back if they like your partner, or if they don’t like her, maybe they think you ought to leave. Either way, they’re not going to be objective or neutral and they won’t pay as much attention to your thoughts on the matter. Friends and family may also be impatient and just wish you’d “make up your mind” and get it over with instead of encouraging you to take the time you need to consider everything that’s on your mind.

● Whatever your issue is, you may be too embarrassed to talk to friends and family about it. You may not have friends that would appreciate you asking questions about your sexuality, for example, or you may not want your friends to know about some things in your past that you think would change the way they look at you.

● You may have tried talking to friends and family and been disappointed by the way they repeated things you said to them that you considered private. Not everyone is able to keep secrets because most people find it helpful to talk about things that bother them. What you say to your friend may bother your friend, and be difficult for your friend to live with just as it was for you to live with.

● And you probably want more than advice and a listening shoulder, even if you don’t realize it. You’d probably like to learn from the experience of going through a hard time so you’re less likely to have that hard time occur to you again, or so that you cope with it better the next time. It’s one thing to survive a trauma. We all do that! But we’d all like to learn from it and thrive and gain the skills it takes to become a better person with more resilience in the future. To get that sort of a learning experience, you probably would do best with a professional teacher, and that’s what a counselor is.
Why does my doctor want me to get counseling?
Psychotherapy (or talk therapy, or counseling) is one of the best-researched treatments known to medicine. In a scientific review of 457 studies on the success of psychotherapy, conducted in 1980 by Consumer Reports ™,

Smith et al reported that “psychotherapy benefits people of all ages as reliably as schooling educates them, medicine cures them, or business turns a profit.”

Of course, not everyone gets educated by going to school, and not all businesses make a profit. But counseling, even when it is very short, is good for your physical and mental health. Just as your physician might refer you to a surgeon or a dermatologist for specialty treatment, your physician would refer you for counseling because it’s good for what ails you. Counseling is a treatment that helps most people, most of the time, achieve their physical and mental goals, and your physician wants you to get those benefits.

F.A.Qs. for Counseling Interviews

Top Questions Asked During a Counseling Interview

How can I get the most out of counseling?

What happens in counseling?

Is all counseling the same?

I have real physical problems. How could talking to a counselor help with those?

Is talking to a counselor any different than talking to a friend?

Why does my doctor want me to get counseling?