What is the difference between counseling and psychotherapy

In Colorado, counselors can earn Licensed Professional Counselor LPC status by satisfying a number of educational, experience, and testing requirements over a period of years. Psychotherapy, like counseling, is based on a healing relationship between a health care provider and client.

Psychotherapy, or therapy for short, also takes place over a series of meetings, though often it has a longer duration than counseling. Some people participate in therapy off and on over several years. Instead of narrowing in on individual problems, psychotherapy considers overall patterns, chronic issues, and recurrent feelings.

This requires an openness to exploring the past and its impact on the present. The aim of psychotherapy is to resolve the underlying issues which fuel ongoing complaints. Psychotherapists help to resolve past experiences as part of laying the foundation for a satisfying future. Many psychotherapists are open to and interested in wisdom from a variety of sources: the body , the unconscious, and the inner child, to name a few possibilities.

Therapists should be comfortable working with strong feelings, traumatic memories, and the therapeutic relationship. Psychotherapy is not a licensed profession in Colorado. Colorado psychotherapists must register with the Department of Regulatory Agencies, but they do not have specific training or educational requirements. However, you can narrow your search for a counselor or psychotherapist by considering the following things:. Search for a counsellor or psychologist in your local area.

As Seen On. Your payment is being processed, thank you for your patience! Broadly speaking, counselling focuses on treating unwanted or distressing emotional or behavioural symptoms. The aim of counselling is to ease emotional distress and help you get back to a normal level of functioning. For example, if somebody is suffering depression following a relationship breakup, counselling will help overcome the depression so that the person feels better again.

For example, they both aim at easing emotional distress so that you can get on with living a normal life again and both approaches will help you learn more effective ways of managing the problem should the same thing occur in the future. In other words, what is it about your psychological makeup that might influence the situations you find yourself in? So, if we look back at the previous example of somebody suffering depression following a breakup, psychotherapy will initially try to ease the depression, but then focus more on why this happened.

For example, what were the underlying factors that might have contributed to the relationship failing? How come this person often ends up with similar experiences in their relationships? So back to your search for a therapist. If things in your life were fine before, and an event or series of events has caused you to hit an emotional roadblock, then counselling will help you feel better and get back to where you were before the incident s occurred.