How to make the best out of therapy:

Counseling is a collaborative process.  Although the counselor has been through significant training and has a certain expertise, clients should be ready to work.  That involves coming into sessions with their set of agendas.  The client is in the driver's seat of counseling in a sense.  Yes, the counselor may have the road map of where sessions must go (while sometimes that roadmap is figured out during the journey counseling collaboratively).  It may seem contradictory at first but I believe evidence points to the highest level of effectiveness taking place when individuals learn how to navigate and find out their own roadmap.  The role of counselors then is to ask the right questions through reflection that lead the client, it is sometimes to give tools, or other times to validate the challenging path towards healing, or to respectfully challenge clients to reassess how they may process something so that they can reprocess unhealthy narratives, or other times to mirror the client through questioning to raise self-awareness. ​