How Does A Counselor Make A Difference?

When we’re considering counseling, it’s natural to wonder how a counselor is actually going to help us. Is our counselor going to just chat about our problems with us, or are they going to offer us real solutions to the problems we’re facing? The right therapist can make the difference between growth and stagnation, but how can you tell which therapist is right for you? 

“Talk therapy turns hysterical misery into mundane unhappiness.” – Sigmund Freud

How Does A Counselor Help You? 

Many of the practices we undertake in therapy can be attempted and benefited from the comfort of your own home. The knowledge we might need is out there, and it’s completely possible to seek it out and learn it for yourself, but the question is: does it have to be that hard? 

There’s a reason we send children to school instead of just handing them a tablet and an internet connection. Some lessons are best learned from a teacher. The right counselor will teach you the lessons you need to thrive.

• A Therapist Can Recognize Symptoms. Therapy can help us recognize problems we didn’t even know we had. Some of us go on for years living with debilitating symptoms we thought were just ordinary facets of the human experience. The right counselor will help you identify your issues and work through them. They are there to help you check your blindspots and gain clarity and a new perspective on issues that once felt impossible.
• Counsel You Through A Difficult Phase. When we’re really struggling, it’s natural to need someone to lean on. It can be deeply healing to receive specialized support for our emotions when we’re experiencing a challenging life transition. A counselor can help you keep the flame of hope alive and find the resilience you’ve always had within you and break free from self-imposed limitations. 
• Give You The Tools In Therapy To Handle Life. Have you ever felt like life should be the sort of thing that comes with an operations manual? Life throws a lot of grief our way (some would argue too much), and a counselor can help us sort through our problems and figure out which coping tools are suited for each one. 

Which Therapy Helps With Anxiety Relief?

Therapy can work miracles when it comes to anxiety relief. Anxiety can cloud your judgment, and make inconvenient coincidences feel like acts of god intended to demoralize and defeat us. Counseling can help you take a step back and see your situation minus the fog of anxiety.

• DBT Helps With Anxiety. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy helps us to look at ideas that are seemingly mutually exclusive, and figure out how these concepts can coexist in your reality. DBT gives us the opportunity to see through the false dichotomies we’ve dreamed up in our head.
• Art Therapy Offers Anxiety Relief. Art therapy is a great outlet for when our feelings outnumber our words to describe them. Doing expressive arts therapy can also offer unique insight into the unconscious roots of our anxiety. When you feel your anxiety in your body, and you’re not sure how to work through it, a therapist can teach you how to use art therapy as a coping tool. 
• Counseling To Improve Mindfulness. The right counselor can train you in the discipline of mindfulness, but what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is the act of placing yourself in the present moment without dissociation or distraction. If you can master mindfulness, you can escape the grasp of anxious thoughts about the inaccessible past and the unknowable future.

How Do Therapy And Counseling Help With Depression? 

If you’ve been grappling with depression, you may have been doing it as long as you can remember. It might feel easier to take your symptoms as a given rather than a cause for self-care. It could even feel like there’s no hope for progress, so why should we bother with going to counseling over something that might still be with us our whole lives? 

Having the tools to deal with chronic depression can make the difference between an unbearable burden and a manageable weight upon your shoulders. So what kind of therapies can help with treating depression?

• EMDR Therapy Can Alleviate Depression. EMDR therapy uses eye movement and visual stimulation to hack your brain into calmness. A therapist then uses that calm state to target traumatic or difficult to approach memories and cope with them. 
• Challenging Your Patterns With Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT is the process of organizing and managing our thoughts. That might sound like a lot of work, and it is. That’s why working with a professional can be so vital. The right counselor can help you see which thought patterns are serving you, and which beliefs to let go of.
• Therapy Can Help You Find Hope. Resilience takes a lot of strength, but real strength comes from exercise and practice. The right counselor can guide you in strengthening and exercising your sense of hope. Much like building physical muscles through repeated effort, strengthening resilience involves reinforcing the neural pathways in your brain that foster hope.

Can A Counselor Change Your Life?

With the right counselor on our shoulder, we can find mental wellness and serenity in even the most challenging situations. But it’s natural to want specifics. How specifically can the right counselor change your life?

• Quinn Smalley, LMHC, ATR , Is A Counselor For Life Transitions. Quinn Smalley is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who helps her patients adjust to new situations, like leaving home for college, the end of a serious relationship, or the start of a new career. Quinn Smalley combines CBT and Art Therapy 
• Michael Anthony, LCSW, Is A Counselor For Relationships. Michael Anthony is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who helps his clients navigate relationship issues, toxic masculinity, and the search for inner peace. Michael is a somatic and mindfulness-based therapist who incorporates the teachings from Martial Arts in his sessions.
• Lauren Mishkin, LMHC, Is A Trauma Counselor. Lauren Mishkin is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who helps her patients with exploring their past, healing from trauma, and finding renewed hope in the future by accessing your body-informed wisdom. Build a map for your nervous system so you can step out of your head and into the body.  
• Alli Cravener, Counseling Intern, Helps You Unlock Your Creativity. Alli Cravener is a Student Counselor in St. Petersburg who helps her clients find their identity and explore their inner child through art therapy, and find freedom from self-imposed limitations and fears. 

Finding Counseling In St. Petersburg

Finding St. Petersburg counseling can be an ordeal. We live in a big place, and one look at the health insurance marketplace will tell you: you can fit a lot of therapists in this city. So even if you’ve decided that getting help from a counselor is right for you, there’s still an unfortunate amount of legwork left to do. 

So let us help you! 

We will match you up with a right-fit counselor that meets your needs and helps you thrive, whether it’s with a counselor on our team, or with someone in our network, our goal is to help you find a quality therapist. We will help you check your in-network and out-of-network insurance benefits to make the process as simple, easy, and straightforward as possible.  Click here to schedule a consultation.

Sunny Ebsary is an educator, multi-modal artist, and writer specializing in the intersection of myth and mental health. Sunny’s writing walks the line between poetic and logical, giving readers a chance to interface with the mind and imagination. Sunny’s been putting pen to paper since he was a child, writing everything from albums, novels, and plays, to essays, interactive games, and of course, many articles! While studying both psychology and writing, he realized his real passion in life was helping others unlock their creative spark. Whether he’s leading a D&D game, directing a production, or diving deep into the brain, you can be sure Sunny will be ushering you toward finding meaning in your life.