TREATMENT OF HEADACHES: COUNSELLING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

The counsellor or psychotherapist’s job is to lead the client to see her problems more clearly, and make up her own mind on what to do about them.

There are many different types of counselling and psychotherapy: Freudian and lungian psycho-analysis, psychotherapy, transactional analysis (TA), behavioural therapy, cognitive therapy, etc. They all have slightly different ways of tackling mental and emotional problems. Some of them – the analysis type – concentrate on .the workings of the unconscious mind; psychotherapies are more concerned with conscious events; and behavioural therapy works through teaching the client to re-learn those responses which have been incorrectly learned in the past (for example, an irrational fear of spiders, when she knows that those spiders can’t injure her).

Counselling is a complex affair, though the underlying concept remains the same – to identify those mal-adapted ideas, memories or attitudes which are contributing to the current problem. These mal-adapted responses are often based on fears and worries which have been buried in the subconscious, often because they’re too painful or too terrifying to be brought out into the conscious. The psychotherapist’s job is to allow the client to recognise these fears, bring them out into the open and examine them. When painful memories have been understood and re-interpreted they are usually much less threatening, and so the client doesn’t fear his guilt so much, and can learn to deal with similar problems in a totally different way.

A highly recommended therapy is transactional analysis (TA), which is the nearest thing to do-it-yourself psychiatry there is. It’s simple, and practical, and it helps you get to grips with your own problems. An excellent guide to transactional analysis is the book Horn to Win by Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward.

Whatever counselling system you choose, you will almost certainly need at least some professional advice; it is impossible to be objective about yourself (and even more impossible if you’re anxious or depressed). You need the steadying, reasoned, objective assessment of a competent outsider. Otherwise you may go around trying to change (he wrong things – or the right things, but in the wrong way.

Finally, beware of the amateur shrink! Counselling is complex and difficult – and a counsellor can do damage. Although humans can’t remember physical pain (we can remember that we had it, but we can’t recall the pain itself) we can remember mental pain. We can also re-create mental pain by re-living experiences that were mentally searing. A poor counsellor can do untold harm; by trying to force you into inappropriate responses, he can hinder your recovery, and it can give you further mental pain.

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