Individual Counseling

You may be wondering why someone would pursue individual counseling if — on the outside — it seems they are fine. Even when a person appears to be okay, going to counseling is a healthy way to respond to the stressors of life.

Individual counseling at McKinney Christian Counseling can be sought for a variety of reasons, but usually the goal is to help a person identify thought patterns or behavioral patterns that are keeping him or her stuck and prohibiting him or her from moving forward in a particular area of life.

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What is individual counseling?

Individual counseling is when someone sees a trained, licensed counselor for one-on-one talk therapy related to a problem, life transition, or difficulty that the person is struggling to face or overcome on his or her own. It does not signify weakness to seek out individual counseling; in fact, it can be a sign of self-awareness to recognize when your thoughts, beliefs, emotions, or behaviors are keeping you from leading a contented lifestyle.

Why would a person seek individual counseling?

People come to counselors at McKinney Christian Counseling for a variety of reasons. They may be struggling in the short term due to a job loss, moving to a new city, or struggling to make friends as an adult in an unfamiliar place. It could be a long-term issue such as trust issues due to lack of attachment with parents as a young child or an unwanted behavioral pattern in his or her life that hasn’t been overcome.

Some specific reasons that people meet with a counselor are:

Dealing with anger or difficulty managing behavior related to your anger
Struggling to connect deeply with your spouse
Inability to be vulnerable, which impacts the growth of relationships
Anxiety or depression
Eating patterns that are harmful or dangerous
Identifying patterns of your parenting style that are negatively impacting your children
Substance abuse
Sexual addiction issues
Problems accepting new situations or transitioning to new seasons of life
Communication barriers that persist between you and different co-workers
Dealing with a serious illness
Death of a loved one
Desire healing from an abusive relationship, either as a child or as an adult
Self-discovery so that you can pinpoint blind spots or other areas of potential difficulty in your relational patterns and overall perceptions in life

Why is individual counseling important?

Individual counseling in McKinney, Texas can help a person identify triggers, unhealthy emotional responses, thought patterns, and behavioral tendencies that he or she didn’t realize he or she had. Many people learn these ways of thinking, believing, and acting from their family of origin, so they do not immediately recognize them until relational difficulties pop up in marriage, in parenting, or at school and work.

Counseling for individuals in McKinney can be helpful at any stage of life and any age. From young children all the way through senior adults, talking to a trained counselor can help a person normalize what is true and what is not true, what is helpful and what is harmful, and find ways to chart a new course as they move forward in life.

What should I expect from individual counseling?

Seeing a counselor at McKinney Christian Counseling can range from a handful of times to a long-term relationship that gives you a trusted, unbiased, trained person upon which to bounce ideas, struggles, questions, and changing patterns over time. Before you know which kind of counseling you may want, simply identifying some of the reasons you are considering counseling is a good start.

In your initial counseling session, your counselor will get to know you, tell you what is his or her philosophy of therapy, and explain practical details such as fees and missed sessions, how to schedule appointments, and how long to expect each session to last.

After these first explanations, your counselor may ask you what brought you to counseling. You do not need to identify this exactly, but having a rough idea of what brought the idea into your mind is helpful. This will allow the counselor to ask more refined questions to help identify your needs, the best plan of treatment, and ways to move forward with your goals.

Depending on those goals, which may be defined over the course of multiple sessions, your counselor can lay out a plan for how long he or she thinks the counseling will be helpful for you, and you can discuss whether this meets your expectations too. It’s important to feel comfortable with your counselor and come to the sessions with the same ideas about how to move forward and what “success” in counseling looks like.

What are some specific topics that may be discussed in individual counseling?

While many topics can be explored, this varies widely based on an individual’s specific situation. He or she may know exactly why he or she is there, and still others may need several sessions to “unpack” the motivation for going to counseling. Both are welcome.

Topics of discussion may include:

Family history
Relationships of significance in your life
Areas of concern in your everyday experiences, such as work, friendships, and marriage and/or parenting relationships
Fears and beliefs about those fears
Spiritual beliefs and how that impacts your life
Thought patterns and how those thought patterns are impacting your day-to-day choices
Areas of personal struggle, such as an eating disorder, anxiety, anger, or deep sadness
Communication styles and how they are either hindering some area of your life or helping you — and ways to incorporate even better communication patterns into everyday life
Strategies for wellness such as coping with stress and/or life transitions
Conflict management, particularly as it relates to one or two specific relationships in one’s life — learning how to “fight well” can translate into any relationship
Expectations and disappointments, and how to cope with those in healthy ways
Identifying faulty logic so that you can re-train your mind to think differently and adapt this to life changes, relationships, and other areas of struggle
Concern about thoughts of suicide, mental health struggles, or other serious deficits that prohibit a person from leading a joyful life
Sleep issues that may stem from non-physical ailments such as childhood trauma or stress, and how to develop coping strategies to improve these
Challenging life events such as divorce or death of a loved one
Grief over the loss of a loved one
Marital struggles during which one of you wants to pursue deeper healing so that the relationship, as it depends on that person, can thrive
Play therapy for children who need help to explore their emotions in ways that are comfortable for them developmentally
Identity issues that make it hard for a person to move through life with clarity and confidence

Next Steps

If you think individual counseling in McKinney, Texas might be what you need, we’d love to help you connect with a trained, licensed counselor. He or she will ask you some simple questions and then meet with you one-on-one to get an understanding of who you are and why you’d like to pursue counseling.

The Christian counselors at McKinney Christian Counseling can help you recognize negative thought or behavioral patterns and how to overcome them with strategic, thoughtful changes to your mental awareness.

Finding the right counselor for you will be determined by what your goals are and how comfortable you are with the counselor with whom you start. He or she may or may not be the best pairing, so if not, we have many other counselors from which you may choose to select another one.

Learning to identify at least one reason for pursuing counseling will be helpful to your counselor. As you get into a discussion, you may uncover more reasons to see him/her regularly, and that is okay. Your counselor can help you navigate those and find hope for the future.