Personal Counseling and Psychotherapy   
Joe Ferguson, PhD | November 20, 2009

     When you fire a starting gun, click a desktop icon, get married, make a business decision, have a baby, file for a divorce or declare a war, you are activating a process which then takes on a life of its own. There must be 50 ways to leave your lover once you decide to do that, although people routinely suffer years or decades of agonizing ambiguity before activating any of them. Showing up at your first 12-step meeting, enrolling in a graduate program, or calling me for consultation each activate a consequential process which then takes on a life of its own. When you call me, you will activate a process that is aimed at the activation of further processes intended to accomplish goals that you may or may not yet have identified. I have a bag of tools and tricks to address specific purposes once we reach a shared understanding of what we are doing together. My counseling process consists entirely in discussion and I rarely take any concrete action outside the consulting room, which is where I will try to get you to take it. Here’s how it works.

     First we get acquainted by negotiating about your autobiography, your circumstances, and your issues. These are surprisingly slippery subjects that are open to a wide range of interpretations and I rarely get clear instructions from my clients about what they would like to accomplish. As I absorb what you tell me about yourself and your life I reflect what I hear, but I also reformulate and challenge it in order to reach a common understanding about what is important. I will try to be as provocative as our relationship comfortably permits at each stage. Our common understanding of what we are doing together may be considerably different after a few sessions than it was at the start of our encounter. Sometimes it is difficult to establish what the issues really are and sometimes it is easy. The first part of the process aims at clarification, interpretation and insight.

      But insight does not automatically result either in effective action or a productive shift in perspective, one or the other of which is the whole point of the counseling process. Carrying insight into action or achieving a shift in perspective usually involves wrestling with the same obstacles or contradictions that created the problem in the first place. This can be arbitrarily complicated and difficult. Effective counseling and psychotherapy can therefore be either rapid and straightforward or lengthy and difficult; depending upon you, your history and your circumstances. Call me and activate our collaborative process.