Some facts about Counseling, Psychotherapy, Psychology and Psychiatry
What makes for good therapy
People often have a lot of confusion around the difference between Counseling, Psychotherapy, Psychology and Psychiatry. This is understandable because sometimes there is not a lot of difference at all, and at other times the differences can be quite pronounced.
From an academic perspective, the training of each particular field is quite distinct.
For Counselors, the standard training would center around developing good listening skills and the ability to assess the needs of their clients for further referral. Deeper behaviour modification therapy is not so much a factor.
For Psychotherapy, deep behaviour modification is the central focus of the training, as well as general counseling skills. Counseling and Psychotherapy training is usually done at independent colleges.
Psychology training is a longer University degree and has a broader, harder academic edge to it. Psychology is a diverse field that does not necessarily involve working with people as a therapist. Counseling psychology is a particular field that a psychology graduate pursues in post graduate studies. Psychologists tend to rely more heavily of clinical tests, categories and scales to assess their client's needs and conditions. Psychology has a closer relationship to the medical field, seeing itself more as a hard science.
To be a Psychiatrist, one must first complete a medical degree. Psychiatry training is more centered around drug therapy and clinical assessment, with less emphasis on counseling and psychotherapy. A psychiatrist would actually have the least amount of counseling skills of the four different fields, even though it has more status, and a higher fee.
It is often assumed that because psychology is studied at a university level, it is the superior where counseling and therapy is concerned. This, however, is not necessarily the case. Once a psychology student has finished studying the broader range of subjects at undergraduate level, the actual counselor and therapist training is no more than a counseling or psychotherapy diploma. In fact, psychotherapy studies can even be more in depth.
So much depends on the personal ability, dedication and further training beyond the standard qualifications of the individual counselor (using counselor as a generic term for all four fields). An essential factor that makes for an effective counselor is the practitioner's personal development – their ability to "walk their talk". Can the practitioner be an actual living example of a well adjusted individual, or even an enlightened individual? As a potential guide in the pursuit of mental/emotional and even spiritual wellbeing, one would certainly hope so.
Unfortunately, this is mostly not the case. A student can make their way through any of these fields of study without ever being required to examine the level of their own emotional maturity. This is even more the case with university study.
Training that develops emotional maturity, which is the same thing as wisdom, cannot be successfully carried out through academic training alone. In order to develop one's emotional maturity, one must enter into a carefully facilitated environment where one's own fears and insecurities are confronted and exposed for the purpose of consciously "cleaning up" one's personal issues. Another way to achieve this same goal is for practitioners to suffer their own personal crisis that awakens them to the inadequacies of standard counseling practices in what ever field they are in. They experience their own state of emotional vulnerability that they then need journey through. This personal experience serves to deepen their understanding of what it takes to overcome fear and insecurity. They get to experience what it is like to be the one seeking help.
Those who have not suffered and overcome their own personal crisis tend to assume that this deeper training is unnecessary, and actually deny its validity. This tends to be the case for the more mainstream or "orthodox" approaches to counseling. The counselor's lack of personal skill end up being shielded behind rigid professional boundaries where they can appear as the expert and be in a position of power where the client is concerned. Of course professional boundaries are very important, as with other ethical considerations within the counseling environment. However, when they compensate for a lack of emotional maturity in the practitioner, they tend to become a barrier that stifles the warmth and comradary that is essential to create an emotionally healing environment. The practitioner, due to their own lack of emotional confidence and wisdom, ends up being more worried about being sued by a client than being focused on what it takes to create a genuine counseling relationship with that client.
A key factor in this issue is the counselor's ability to work skillfully with feelings. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), the main counseling tool of psychologists, tends not to engage feelings directly, but tries to overcome fear and insecurity by strengthening their client's ability to think rationally. CBT is an excellent therapy tools, but in many cases it simply does not go deep enough. Therapy approaches that work with feeling in order to reach deeper into the mind's confusion requires a deeper level of emotional awareness from the practitioner. They are literally being guides into the often mysterious world of the unconscious, and they can only know this territory if they have gone there themselves through personal experience and in depth experiential training. In this approach to counseling, the counselor becomes more like a traveling guide and companion who personally knows the terrain. The practitioner is more like a team mate in the healing process than a distant expert hiding behind rigid "professional" boundaries. This closer and more meaningful relationship is managed by the practitioner due to a deeper level of emotional maturity.
It is interesting to note that once practitioners in any of the four counseling fields undergoes their own personal journey of emotionally healing, their therapy approaches become very similar. This is a good indication that they have all been "initiated" into a healing process that is a natural and common factor in the potential of humanity. In other words there is a standard set of factors or laws that govern the healing and harmonizing of the human mind, just like there are laws of physics. What works, works.
In my own work and personal journey I have boiled these essential factors down to two in particular – Unconditional Love and Full Personal Responsibility. All effective counseling and healing flows from these two core principles of life.
Here at the Inner Harmony Center, we regard this experiential path of personal and profession practitioner training to be essential as an ongoing life journey. All the practitioners who work at the center see their own path of self-realization as the foundation of their own life and work. Whether qualified as a counselor, psychotherapist or psychologist, the depth and skill of their work is essentially the same. When you seek counseling at the Inner Harmony Center, you can be confident that the practitioner you choose knows how you feel and has on some genuine level, trod the path before you.