Sometimes it’s important to have a deep knowledge of learning coping mechanisms to solve any problems in life, for eg- how to handle depression and anxiety, how to build self confidence and have a good self- esteem, how to handle frustration when things aren’t going our way, how to focus our mind on what we want in life and so forth.
In all the above conditions, psychotherapy turns out to be a great boon for us.
Psychotherapy is concerned with the alleviation of human suffering. It refers to a host of psychological therapies, the broad spectrum of which has hypnosis as its one extreme and counselling at the other.
Counselling thus is a form of psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy is concerned with the reconstruction of the individual at the conscious, sub conscious and unconscious levels. Psychotherapy is more concerned about alleviating pathological conditions.
Psychotherapy utilises psychoanalysis, hypnosis, and such other psychological approaches for therapeutic purposes.
Need for counselling and Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy and counselling exist because of the need for them in our society which has become highly complex, multi-valued and multi-roled. Additionally, society is characterised by great economic and moral changes. This has brought about serious problems of adjustment for everyone and playing different roles at the same time or at different times. The situation of having to cope with the multiplicity of roles and with value conflicts need attention. Counselling and psychotherapy have developed to help individuals find appropriate strategies to function in relation to their personalities and the roles they called upon to play.
Personality and roles are often antagonistic but they go along. The roles are reasonably broad cultural patterns or forms through which individuality is expressed. This freedom to create an identity through individual integration in playing the available rules also integrates them uniquely and correct characteristically. Overt behavioural or action patterns are the manifestations of personality. Interaction of personality and situational demands generates and confirms individuals sense of self-hood. When problems arise, Psychotherapy and Counselling become useful. Problems may arise in the development process of personality or in the failure of personality to cope with the demands of role performance. They may arise owing to the transition from one to another, from role choice, or from conflicts among different roles, or in the role expectation due to the complexity and fluidity of social environment.
Counselling or psychotherapy are conceived as assisting or helping processes to provide optimal conditions in which individuals are required to deal with problems of personality growth. A clash of roles in the individuals psycho dynamics leads to interpersonal conflicts and problems such as ambivalences, guilt feelings, innhibitions and so on. The problems could be used by fixation at different levels of psyche development. Specific learning problems resulting from problems such as vocational choices and marital adjustment also need to be resolved.
Conflicts may vary in intensity depending on varying degrees of intrapsychic conflicts which may be independent of the immediate environmental conditions. What usually determines how well a person uses his potential in resolving problems or how rapidly he learns or integrates, is the extent to which she or he is free from or is afflicted by disrupting internal tendencies.
Psychotherapy is the treatment of problems of an emotional nature by psychological means.