Counselling

Counselling is more than just talking about your worries and problems. By discussing feelings with a trained counsellor you can try to find out what makes you feel this way, and what you can do to cope. Counselling can be really helpful because you can share how you are feeling with someone who doesn't know you or your family. You can also be sure that what you are talking about will stay confidential.

Counselling can be a difficult process because it can be hard to talk about things that have distressed or hurt you. However, by working through your problems with your counsellor, you can accept them and understand yourself better.

Therapy

Therapy is like counselling, but there is usually a clearer goal of aiming to treat either specific or deeper problems. You might have identified these yourself, or they might have been diagnosed by a mental health professional. Therapy is confidential and can be undertaken in individual sessions or in a group. Therapy requires you to actively take part in tackling your problems. You will need to set yourself goals and might need to work both within and outside sessions to achieve these.

If you think either counselling or therapy would be right for you then you should talk to your GP in the first instance. Alternatively you could also look at our list of local and national accredited helplines to see if any of the services on it can help you or Barking and Dagenham Talking Therapies.