What Does a Psychotherapist Do?
A Psychotherapist works with people who have emotional, behavioural, psychological or mental difficulties. The work is mainly to encourage the client to talk and explore their feelings, beliefs and thoughts, and often, their childhood. It is a process which seeks to help the person gain an increased capacity for choice, through which the individual becomes more autonomous and self determined. As a result the work is often long term, sometimes more than once a week. Psychotherapeutic approaches may be based on scientific, humanist, psychoanalytical or philosophical. What does a Counsellor do? A counsellor works in much the same way as a psychotherapist, in terms of encouraging the client to talk and explore their feelings, beliefs and thoughts with the hope that in doing so, the client will gain an increased capacity for choice. Counsellors will generally work with the client on specific issues or problems such as a relationship difficulty, or an anxiety about a work problem, such as be
Mental health professionals often specialize in certain types of therapeutic services, from personal counseling to behavior modification to supervised drug therapy. A psychotherapist has both psychological and psychiatric training, but tends to concentrate on the counseling and behavior modification aspects when it comes to the treatment of clients. A psychotherapist generally acts as a guide and mentor while the client works through stressful or self-limiting personal issues. One of the main tools a psychotherapist would use is talk therapy. During a session, a psychotherapist encourages his or her client to express any concerns, fears, traumatic memories or other thoughts without the fear of public exposure or judgement. The psychotherapist may allow the client to talk for the entire session as a cathartic exercise, or he may ask specific questions to help the client explore a specific issue. The point of a “talking cure” is not for the psychotherapist to force a solution on a client
