Why even go to counseling??

Why do people go to counseling? For some, it is a challenging peak to ascend, to swallow your pride and seek help. So what does it take for a person to make the call and enter into counseling? In an article about counseling and therapy, the writers seek to communicate some reasons why people enter into counseling.

In class, we talked about the “ideal person” and the “ideal of functioning” and what that may look like. It was difficult to define what this “ideal” looks like with so many different people in the world with different worldviews. Even in a class of students with a predominantly Biblical worldview, it was impossible to define what the “ideal of functioning” looked like.

But it seems that in each person’s individual mind, they have a pretty good picture of what “ideal” or “normal” looks like for them, and they are comfortable with that picture in their mind, even though it may be hard to communicate it or agree upon it with other people. As we were discussing this in class, my group seemed to think that a non-Christian’s picture of “ideal” was drastically and completely different from a Christian’s picture of “ideal,” that a non-Christian would go to counseling to make themselves feel better or meet temporal needs, but a Christian would go to counseling for their spiritual victory and to the glory of God. But read over the website again; the reasons for going to counseling that they list seem to unite all humans, Christian and non-Christian, and I am led to wonder if most of us do keep our focus on our happiness, satisfaction, and temporal needs. If this is true, are we just merely human or have we settled for living how this world lives instead of living the life that God has called us to? It is not my intent to answer this question in this post, but to merely reveal how similar we are to all humans, especially without the grace of God, and allow us to ponder what “ideal” should mean or what our goals as clients in counseling should be, because it is much larger than our own happiness and satisfaction.