REASONS FOR SEEKING COUNSELING HELP

You didn’t just appear today. You have taken years of experiences, and influences (favorable and unfavorable) to get to today. Sometimes you think to yourself “if only I could fix and improve a few things in my life” or you feel you are in really bad shape and your life is in shambles. In either of these situations, or a range of problem issues in-between, a professional counselor working independently or through an EAP or a Mental Health online service can help.

 Just as other traits like height, weight, are distributed on a scale from low to high across populations, so is the ease and ability to resolve personal and emotional difficulties. Some people breeze through problem solving a particular issue while other people struggle.  In those situations that you can’t seem to resolve, a professional counselor can help.

Thinking outside of ourselves, and then looking at ourselves from the outside in situations, and having the insights and strengths to change, improve, and do things differently is sometimes a real challenge for many persons. Oft times, we need professional help without feeling threatened or judged to get a “read” on ourselves, and then be supported and guided to change.

Many persons engage in circular thinking, reinforcing their thinking and behaviors – so they are at a standstill. A professional counselor would be able to support and guide you to see different perspectives outside of your circular thinking  and guide you forward and develop insights and behavioral improvement that you wanted but did not know how to attain.

In addition, when you are emotionally overwhelmed, you feel trapped and cornered. A professional counselor would support and guide you to open up options so you begin to see there are other avenues for you to take and to move forward. A professional counselor would assist you in weighing each of the options, considering the pros and cons as they apply to you, and then support you in choosing and support the thinking and behavioral changes necessary in making that option come through for you.

In many organizations, big or small, offer free counseling through EAPs and versions of digital/virtual mental health counseling. At least three conditions are necessary for employees to use these services. – 1. The fear that management will find out needs to be removed - if your workforce doesn't feel comfortable reaching out for help, they won't. 2. Through word of mouth, and comments by co-workers, these EAP and Mental Health services need to be seen as effective and helpful. 3. Employees need be fully aware of the range of mental health issues/emotional difficulties they can bring to EAP and Mental Health services.

Based on my many years of EAP experiences this last point is the least explored, but very necessary. There are numerous reasons for seeking professional counseling help as we travel though our journey of life. Rather than providing a brief laundry list of broad categories and expecting you to know exactly what is troubling you, I will give you a large list of issues that people can at one time or another go through that could use professional help. It will be easy to see if one or several resonate with you:

Relationships with others: (friendship, dating, roommate):

-         Conflicts in the way you view situations and the way they view situations

-         Conflicts in your routines and habits and their routines and habits

-         Conflicts in your need for control and their need for control

-         Conflicts in your decision-making style and their decision-making style

-         Jealousy and the expression of jealousy

-         Cross purposes in your communication with each other

-         Lack of communication in the relationship

-         Aggression, and expression of aggression – silent and withdrawn or outward including violence

Relationship: (specific to marriage, common law, love interests):

-         Miscarriage

-         Infertility

-         Differences that the two of you have in expressing affection and love causing friction

-         Differences that the two of you have in attraction you have for each other causing friction

-         Differences in expressing sexual attraction causing friction

-         Differences in levels of sexual arousal and activity causing friction

-         Differences in how each of you handle your shared finances

-         Codependency and thinking you are responsible for meeting your partner’s needs

-         Increasing differences in your interests and activities

-         Growing apart

-         Less and less time together

-         Not enjoying the time together

-         Developing a fear of the other person

-         Being suspicious that the other is seeing others

-         Doing more and more activities alone

-         Increasing frequency of arguments

-         Fantasizing and thinking of separation

-         Fantasizing and thinking of announcing divorce

-         Flirting and entertaining and entering side affairs

-         Being asked for a divorce

-         Asking for divorce

-         Dealing with divorce

-         Dealing with child custody and sharing child upbringing with spouse

-         Dating after divorce

Family:

-         Disappointment and anger over how you were treated as a child

-         Lack of parent attention, interest, and support as you were growing up

-         Abusive parents – either physical, sexual, or emotional

-         Abandonment by a parent

-         Complicated family dynamics – parents, siblings

-         Not getting along with siblings and increasingly feeling intolerable of them and finding them unbearable

-         Estrangement – from children, or parents, or other relatives

-         A family member you care about has become chronically ill or disabled

-         Caring for an elderly parent

-         Dealing with a dying parent, family member, or spouse

-         Supporting your spouse, who is caring for an elderly and/or dying parent

-         Dealing with grief and difficulty in supporting yourself, your spouse, or a loved one in persistent and prolonged grief and bereavement.

-         Loss of a family member

-         Being a divorced person in your family

-         Integrating a blended family

 Parenting:

-         Differences in upbringing approaches

-         Difficulty expressing intimacy with children in the house

-         Schooling/educational problems encountered with children

-         Difficulties at school in socializing, bullying or being bullied

-         Bed wetting beyond the usual age

-         Poor eating and sleeping habits

-         Eating disorder

-         Overly active, jumping from one activity to another, or has difficulty paying attention

-         Lying or stealing

-         Police encounters involving your children

-         Substance misuse/abuse among your teens

-         Guilt about working and not being there for your children

-         Being a solo parent and juggling the demands of handling work, chores, and child upbringing

Traumatic Events:

-         Witnessing or being in an accident

-         Witnessing the death of a loved-one

-         Being a victim in a house invasion, a carjacking, or in a store/bank robbery

-         Being a survivor of a suicide of a loved one

-         Suffering from a strong and persistent reaction to a tragic event such as separation or divorce or loss of job, or a potential terminal diagnosis of an illness.

-         Being bullied repeated

-         Sexual assault

Individual/Personal Issues:

-         You are overthinking things and cluttering your mind

-         You are living in the past. Recreating the past over and over rather than moving on

-         You are overwhelmed with negative thinking, and having frequent pessimistic thoughts.

-         You have dominating fear or over-concern about what may happen. You are creating losing scenarios regularly on events and possible situations that most of the time, never end up happening.

-         You are always comparing yourself to others and setting others as a standard. You lose right from the bat – there is always someone in better shape, more attractive or handsome, smarter, more competent, richer, etc.

-         You worry about what others think of you. Living for others. Constantly doing things that please others.  

-         You are constantly feeling insecure and inferior in social situations and in activities. Your thoughts are constantly dominated by these thoughts of insecurity.

-         You are using too much alcohol, prescription medications, or street drugs

-         You have a gambling problem

-         You have an eating disorder – the main ones are anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive over-eating.

-         You are plagued by a phobia or phobias – feeling afraid of certain insects like spiders, of being in open spaces and going outdoors, of tight and cramped spaces or even talking to others

-         You feel someone is following you, or someone is watching you, or someone will poison your food.

-         You are faced with a major live change

-         You have become chronically ill or disabled

-         You have had a brain injury or concussion and have difficulty recovering

-         You are having suicidal thoughts

-         You are depressed much of the time. You feel helpless, you feel worthless, and you have lost your energy, sexual drive, and you have stopped showering or washing your hair regularly. You are missing work and you don’t seem to care you are missing work, and for that mattered, about anything around you. You don’t even open your computer to read your emails.

-         Post-partum depression and rather than feeling joyful, you are down, blue, discouraged, and feeling quite depressed after the birth of your child

-         You are feeling anxious. You feel like the sky is falling down. You feel like bad things will happen. Doom and gloom dominates your thinking and feelings. You feel overwhelmed and you escape in sleeping a lot. Time seems to be drawn-out. You can’t watch even a ½ hour TV show. You feel restless and on-edge. You want to sleep and block out what is happening around you

-         You are experiencing extreme mood swings. One hour you are happy, smiling, and optimistic and the next hour you are sad, have a long face and feel pessimistic. One day you are feeling on top of the world, shopping, buying, spending money and the next day, you are down, discouraged, and are feeling buyer's remorse.

-         You are gradually withdrawing from social contact. You used to have many friends, and many dinners, and visits, and adventures with others. Now you are alone most of the time and feel lonely.

·       You are seriously feeling stressed out. There are both emotional and physical signs.

The emotion signs include: feeling over-burdened or overwhelmed; feeling nervous, edgy, and even afraid; your thoughts keep racing and you can't switch off; you are unable to enjoy yourself in anything you do; feeling discouraged and disheartened; feeling uninterested in life; you've lost your sense of humor; feeling constantly worried; feeling neglected; and feeling lonely.

The physical signs include: difficulty breathing; blurred eyesight or sore eyes; fatigue; sleep problems including unable to fall asleep, waking up frequently, lying wide-awake in the middle of the night, waking up from intense nightmares; muscle aches and headaches; chest pains and increased high blood pressure; indigestion or heartburn; constant constipation or diarrhea; panic attacks; sudden weight gain or weight loss; developing rashes or itchy skin; and frequent sweating.

 - Feeling burned out. You are feeling empty and mentally exhausted, devoid of motivation, and beyond caring. If you are experiencing burnout you often don't see any hope of positive change in your situations. Every day, you thinking about giving up.

 How is feeling burned out from feeling stressed out? If excessive stress feels like you're drowning in responsibilities, burnout finds you crying all the time and feeling an emptiness and a wall of nothingness.

Gender/Sexuality;

- Difficulty in understanding your feelings around your own sexuality and gender identification

-         Difficulty in expressing/communicating your own “coming out”

-         Understanding and empathizing, with a child, family member or friend who has come out as gay or transgender

Workplace:

-         Difficulty getting along with manager

-         Difficulty getting along with one or more co-workers

-         Dealing with feelings created by exclusion and not belonging by manager or coworkers

-         Isolation at work

-         Swamped and overwhelmed with work for long periods of time

- Being harassed about Human Rights protected groups like race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and physical appearances like height, weight (fat shaming), hair styles, facial looks.

being discriminated against because of skin color or being a member of another race other than caucasian

-         Being sexually harassed ranging from comments about clothes, make-up or lack of make-up, hair style and hair color, and jewelry to physical appearance and characteristics to frequent leering and actual propositions and touching

-         Being bullied from being shouted at, desk thumbing, to being humiliated in front of others to withholding information and attendance at meetings necessary to do job

-         Demands to work extra hours on a regular basis

-         Feeling constantly stressed by ongoing expectations and demands

-         Burned out by constant ongoing expectations, demands, long hours with threat of job loss with no hope of let-up

Note: This does not cover reasons to access ancillary or additional EAP services like Childcare, Eldercare, Legal, Financial, etc.

 As you can see, people can experience many types of problems and emotional difficulties at different times along their journey of life. There are many issues that can beset a person. I have always believed that no one should ever feel they have to deal with any of their feelings alone. I like to quote Fred Rogers, of the well-liked TV children’s show “when we talk about our feelings they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary”. A professional counselor working independently or through, an EAP, or an online Mental Health service can help you resolve the difficulties you are experiencing, and help you know you are not alone.