Do I have too many issues for counseling?
I have so many issues to address. I have a history of sexual abuse, I’m a breast cancer survivor and I am a lifetime insomniac.
I have a long history of depression and I’m beginning to have anxiety. I have low self esteem but I’ve been happily married for almost 35 years.
I’ve never had counseling about any of this. Do I have too many issues to address in counseling?
Absolutely not. It's actually quite rare for someone to come in to therapy for "just one thing." More often than not, even people who seek out therapy "just for anxiety" often find a host of other related things when they start peeling back the layers in therapy.
When clients come to me with a list of things like this, our first step is to put it all out there and THEN to work on finding the "constellation." All of these things tie together to form a more complete picture of who you are and how your experiences have impacted you and have led to other experiences. For example, many clients find it helpful to understand how a history of sexual abuse can increase the likelihood of developing insomnia. Seeing how everything ties together often helps people to slow down and take a step back from the tendency to take each of these struggles as a personal flaw or failure and to see how the whole picture fits.
Plus, on the upside, once you've started to piece together the larger picture, you can use that to decide where to begin. Once you begin learning skills you can apply to one area, often times those same skills can be applied to other concerns with just a little variation. For example, the skills required to process through the beliefs you developed as a result of sexual abuse so that you can start shifting your mindset to more helpful perspectives is actually the same skills you can use to change the thought processes that maintain insomnia. So the skills can be generalized relatively easily!
As long as you're still breathing, there's no such thing as too far gone.
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