Effective and Professional counseling services in Nairobi
Professional counseling
It is a safe, healthy, candid, and confidential interaction between qualified counselors and clients to promote mental health and well-being, enhance self-understanding, and resolve identified concerns. Counseling techniques involve active listening and empathic understanding, releasing the pent-up feelings confronting a client. There are several counseling service providers in Nairobi and Intra Personal Health is one of them.
What is mental health?
Mental health addresses the emotional, psychological, and social well-being of a person. It also helps determine one’s thought process, feelings, and actions and determines how one handles stress, interacts with others, and makes choices. It is not the same as mental illness, although both are equally important issues to be discussed.
What happens during counseling sessions?
Counseling is quite different from someone just listening to you. Clients are active participants in the counseling process at every stage. Councilor is aware that no two people are alike and the client is allowed to explore many aspect of their life and feelings, by talking openly and freely.
Counselling is effective when clients feel safe, understood, respected, and accepted without judgment. Confidentiality is limited when there are risks to the safety of the client or others.
Clients are encouraged to talk freely, and sometimes when group sessions are recommended, family and friends, who are likely to be emotionally involved are encouraged to participate. It is highly unlikely for a counselor to include persons with biases that may be harmful to the success of counseling in the sessions.
How often should one attend counseling sessions?
Regular participation in prescribed sessions should build a client’s change in perspective, understanding, new awareness of feeling, better ways of thinking, change in behaviors, enhanced capacity to tolerate and regulate feelings, and new results in life.
The ultimate aim of counseling is to enable the client to make their own choice, reach their own decision and act upon them accordingly.
Counseling does not:
- Give advice.
- Criticize one’s opinions or perspectives.
- Attempt to solve the client’s challenges.
- Dictate a client’s behavior
- Get emotionally involved with the client.
- Use rigid solutions based on personal perspectives
It can take a number of sessions before progress is recorded but it is a gradual process, with set goals aimed at addressing mental health and making a client live a healthy life.
Knowing your psychologist
Because of sensitivity and the social stigma associated with mental health, due diligence is needed when choosing a care provider. Whether it is someone you have been referred to by your family, friends or general physician, you must make sure that he/she is qualified.
- Ask she/ his membership in a professional association.
- Ask about his/her experience
- Ask if he/she has any additional certification in the field
The role of counseling
You can maintain your mental clarity and perspective even during bad weather by discussing problems with a licensed therapist. Knowing where you are in a relationship or learning to stop worrying about the little things are two examples of how viewing things clearly and in perspective can help you feel better. You and your counselor can decide together on the treatment focus areas (such as grieving, managing ongoing stressors, or recovering from trauma) and the objectives you want to achieve during your time together at the initial session.
Additionally, a qualified counselor can share expertise about mental illnesses that are frequently misdiagnosed, particularly if they are not leading to significant behavioral issues. The first step to taking action, whether this entails pursuing treatment through talk therapy, learning how to better cope with an issue’s effects, or ways to facilitate a condition’s symptom relief, is realizing that you might be affected, even slightly, by conditions like depression or anxiety disorders.