The difference between counselling and psychotherapy is mainly about time and depth of engagement. Counselling tends to be short term, weeks to months, psychotherapy months to years. Both are about facilitating understanding and change, but with psychotherapy the aim is to change the deeper seated structures of the self, and this takes longer. Counselling can turn into psychotherapy, or not, it all depends on what is wanted.
Generally, therapy is about being supported to know ourselves better. Through detailed self-observation we can investigate what is driving us to be the way we are, and then understand and integrating those insights. Change happens, not by attempting to change directly (which rarely works), but through new awareness, through healing and understanding ourselves, and through taking increasing responsibility for ourselves. To me therapy is about being supported to deepen our holistic awareness of our actual here and now experience, facing the many layers of our feelings, challenging our thoughts and obsolete self-stories, and attending to our bodies.
Our difficulties in living come about because we can’t face what life is presenting us with, we turn away from the here and now and react based on our past established habits of avoidance. Anxiety, dissociation, depression, addiction are some of the labels we use for the more extreme forms of these habits. They arise because of trauma, which is the experience of automatically burying and repressing feelings that we cannot cope with in the moment. So trauma usually occurs when the deficit of love or the surfeit of judgement, criticism, abuse, (often both at the same time) are too much to bear. We all have experienced trauma, it is I believe inevitable and pat of the human condition.
The consequence of trauma is that it forces us to desensitize ourselves through splitting the natural connections between our heart, head and body in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the hurt, fear or distress that was too much to bear. But this “adjustment” becomes the deep habits which limits our relationship to our lives, limits our ability to get our needs met, our ability to live in the here and now, our ability to grow and develop, as well as cutting off our creativity. It leads to conflicted, compulsive and confused ways of being, because the parts of ourselves cannot communicate properly with each other, are in conflict with each other. It leaves us de-powered, we don’t know ourselves.
We don’t know what we feel, or are overwhelmed by feelings. We give up on thinking or we over-rely on it. We become disconnected from our body, or we become obsessed with it, we loose access to its wisdom. All three part are also intimately connected. This splitting of the self often cause us to identify with only one part of ourselves. Either our thinking becomes over dominant, our feelings become hyper sensitive, or our bodies take all our attention. We are left stuck with all sorts of compulsive compensatory motivations and reactions.
Avoiding the hurt, distress, pain, fear, grief or shock that we keep locked away is what causes us to become insecure and defensive in all sorts of ways. It makes us fearful of going anywhere near the feelings we buried and repressed. The feelings that cause trauma are normal healthy feelings which if they could be faced and processed would healthily flow through us, inform us and dissipate. When we cannot face them and bury them they get stuck within us and then stagnate, turn sour and negative. We then have a victim part of ourselves that feels bad, of no value, inadequate, not good enough etc. We weave many negative self-stories and associations which re-activate each time we are triggered by circumstances that resemble our trauma, resulting in over re-active hyper-sensitive feelings, self-destructiveness, anxiety, disassociation, depression and so on. Despite our best defensive efforts life will always press the buttons of our trauma and causing us to react in regressive ways surrounded by shame. This is surely why some withdraw from life to life to varying degrees.
The strength and depth of our attachment and identification to our negative self-stories directly correlates to the degree of trauma we have. To heal, we need the presence and wisdom that can only flow from re-integrating our self, which is what psychotherapy is designed to help with. This is the process of re-building those split connections between our head, heart and body so that we have a greater presence to be able to face the “unbearable” experience of our trauma. This facing enables us to heal, and it changes the stuck and adapted structures of ourselves. It is no wonder that it takes time, and that its emphasis is different from counselling and especially “life coaching”, which are more aimed at “symptom relief” and the development of various skills.
One important first step in this conscious reintegration of ourselves, of re-connecting our head, heart and body, is about attending to, listening and sensing the energy of our bodies. This simple mindfulness helps to reverse the agitation of our nervous system caused by the flight/fight/freeze stress responses that trauma trapped inside us. Bringing our attention back to our bodies, grounds us in the here and now so that at least some of our nervous energy can be let go of, or “earthed” as it were. Quietening down this stress can give us the space we need for deeper self-observation. Developing a habit of returning to our bodies, giving them attention, is, to my understanding, essential for our healing and development.
This supports us to face and see the details and layers of our here and now feelings. To become aware of what we are feeling, not just at the top surface layers, but also to those underlying feelings that unconsciously condition our day to day, moment to moment relationship to our lives. This is all about trying to see what is driving us to be the way we are. For instance, behind anger there is often hurt. Behind withdrawal or deflection or acting into some “extrovert” role, there is often shame. Behind anxiety there is self-judgement or grief or distress or fear, and behind depression there is defeatedness, and so on. We need to acknowledge, hear and see our feelings at as deep a layer as possible so as to access the vitally important “compressed” information they contain. It is through this looking, facing and questioning of our feelings that we can start to really understand and know ourselves.
We also need to consciously develop our thinking, taking the time to think through, to question and take responsibility for understanding ourselves and our relationship to our lives and world. Understanding how trauma formed us, helps enormously in forgiving ourselves for being the “dysfunctional creatures” we are. This is often about seeing that as adults we still have deeply childish parts of ourselves. Also, understanding how it is trauma that creates all the compulsive negative and destructive parts of ourselves, helps us to understand that people are fundamentally good. It helps us to stop blaming ourselves and others, which enables us to take more responsibility for being the way we are.
In order to face and meet the hurt, distress, fear, pain of those traumatized parts of ourselves that remain in the shadows of ourselves, in whatever degree of unconsciousness they are held, we need the support of the alive here and now awareness of our bodies, we need to be able to feel what is in our heart, as well as understanding what is going on. We unconsciously and automatically dumped the unbearable feelings of our trauma into our unconscious so that we could survive. If we are to heal we need to bring those feelings back into consciousness. This inevitably means re-experiencing the emotional turbulence, the difficult associations, and those unpleasant sensations that we buried, but this time with the support of a more conscious and resourced adult part of us. This therapeutic help can support us to now hold and contain those almost unbearable wounds we have for so long been defensively resisting meeting. This is difficult work, it needs to be done with support and much self-care and self-compassion, as well as a ruthless honesty, but it does lead to genuine healing and freedom.
Our unconscious has enormous innate wisdom and that wisdom is always trying to find a way to heal us. Our inner conflicts exists because of this. Part of us wants to avoid and part wants to face. Facing the trauma undoes the knots we tied ourselves up in, it then releases our underlying wisdom and we can eventually start participating consciously in our evolving development, towards living ever more authentically and satisfyingly in the here and now.
With our head, heart and body communicating better we have greater presence and the ability to observe ourselves, this enables more awareness and insight and understanding. As part of this we can also re-find our creativity. The totally extraordinary thing about human beings is that we are designed for growth and development, it is embedded in the depth of everyone’s unconscious, in every fibre of the self’s structure. Which is why whenever we are stuck, for whatever reason (usually trauma induced) a deep conflict arises within us, the force of development comes up against a dam and if we cannot find a way of dismantling the dam we end up in all sorts of trouble. Sometimes it can take decades for this process to come to a head, but then if we listen, we can find the wish to find our way out of this conflict.
When we arrive on this path of self-discovery the deep innate forces of growth and development are always there to support us. As Rumi put it, “we cannot aim for love, we can only work to remove the obstacles to love with us”. We cannot “do” growing or healing, it just flows when we remove “what’s in the way”. The further extraordinary aspect of this innate creativity is that this deep wisdom of the self (and of life itself) is always presenting us with the most relevant and suitable “obstacle” for us to deal with at any particular time. We may not want to, we may well rail against having to deal with it, but our task and path is simply to attend to what is right front of our noses, just now. The rest miraculously takes care of itself. It really is the case that each and every “obstacle”, or problem that we have, is the doorway to our further growth and freedom. We can trust life at this deep level!
Our therapy journey is through symptom relief, to self-understanding, to self-responsibility, to realising that “What’s in the way, is the way” (as per the lovely book by Mary O’Malley). This is about consciously using every difficulty we face to grow and heal rather than being caught defensively avoiding them. This process of slowly healing through ever greater self-awareness, enables us to find compassion for ourselves and others, to love ourselves. It gradually frees us from fear.
The process of becoming consciously aware of our experience is a miraculous one. It is one of “making an object out of what we are subject to “ (Robert Kegan). It is about developing our observer “I”, that part of ourselves that is separate and aware of ourselves, un-identified with those mechanical and compulsive compensatory aspects of ourselves. We can then become a participant in the unfolding developmental process that is ourselves. As awareness increases and we integrate our self, our ability to choose the freedom to “be” that we so deeply desire, slowly increases. It is self-knowledge with its truth that sets us free, but it takes time for the structure of our self to loosen, for our behaviour with its ego driven compulsive and compensatory motivations to change. As the habitual and compulsive forces loosen their grip on the self we can move towards opening to the pull of those non-egoic, transpersonal forces of Unconditional Love, Consciousness and Energy that exists deep within us all. This spiritual or transpersonal aspects of ourselves are always there, waiting patiently, wanting to be met and realised. But only is this here and now moment.
Especially over the last twenty years or it has become increasingly clear that our developmental needs to combine the psychological and spiritual (or being) dimensions of ourselves into this clarifying “psycho-spiritual” approach. Ken Wilber, A H Almaas, Jack Cornfield, John Welwood, Peter Levine and Gabor Mate and many others have been establishing this path. We need to heal ourselves psychologically, what Wilber has called “growing up”, which will help us enormously in the task of working towards the more profound “spiritual” freedom of “waking up”.
Throughout this website I have tried to share my understanding and enthusiasm for this psycho-spiritual form of therapy. It has a clear understanding of the processes of change and development through deepening our self-awareness and taking responsibility for ourselves. Whilst therapy supports us to heal and grow, in the end it is only each of us that can know our truth and heal ourselves. Choice is an essential part of this process. Therapy needs to be both support and challenge to really help us on this journey towards our authenticity and freedom, towards realising our extraordinary potential as human beings.
Updated August 2025