Bullshit-Free Counselling - Thomas Michael Semmler

Haha, as a counsellor I'd say that anything that helps, helps — and there should be more of that! However, there is also a certain danger of trivialised oversimplification. Platitudes and stock phrases often reduce complex and ambivalent topics to simplistic half-truths, obscuring their connection to actual human life.

"Live, Love, Laugh", "Can't hurt, won't cost you anything", "You can't win either way", "(I feel) the way everyone else wants me to" — examples of meaningless statements that we often hear or say ourselves instead of engaging with the actual story.

And it's not just negative or neutral platitudes I'm talking about. Especially in today's zeitgeist, where mental health is often sold as a lifestyle, social media bombards us with symbolic toxic-positivity platitudes. Apparently, you just have to manifest your happiness — and if it doesn't materialise, it's your own fault because you simply didn't think positively enough. And if you're doing all of that right, then apparently you haven't paid enough attention to your body, so you should cleanse and detox it. And of course, you should be more mindful, too.

Even counsellors often pick up on these tendencies and offer linguistic vehicles that sound nice but often don't have much substance behind them: "Just be yourself, just like that", "Love your life!", "Take action", "Be someone who enjoys life", "Sunshine people", "Follow your soul's path", etc.

TLDR

Platitudes are of course allowed — and as a systemic counsellor who also works narratively, I understand that sayings and idioms can be extremely useful tools. But they shouldn't make us forget ourselves. Rather than simply accepting platitudes as given truths, I prefer to support my clients in defining their very own headlines. Everything else is, quite frankly, just bullshit.

Yes and no. Under certain circumstances, my offering could certainly be described as "coaching". However, I don't particularly like using the term, because lately there seem to be quite a few people calling themselves coaches and publicly offering services that are not all that different from mine, without having any professional training.

The term "coaching" is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from psychosocial counselling. One argument is that it refers to psychosocial counselling in a professional context. But if you look around on LinkedIn, you'll see that the content of these "coaching" offerings can rarely be limited to anything professional.

So the answer is complicated. Yes, what I offer could be called coaching. But also: No, because what is generally referred to as coaching cannot be compared with the professional standards of trained psychosocial counsellors like me.

Psychotherapists and counsellors share some areas of practice, but psychotherapy is the profession specifically concerned with mental disorders and other clinically significant psychological conditions. In Austria, psychotherapy is a regulated healthcare profession, with its legal scope including the prevention, assessment and treatment of disorders with clinical significance.

This is not meant to speak negatively about psychotherapy. While the understanding of the discipline varies somewhat depending on the particular method or school, the intention of psychotherapy, just like counselling, is to help people grow and develop. And sometimes particularly difficult issues can get in the way of that process — and those issues belong exclusively in psychotherapy.

One thing that can be confusing in English is the word "counselling" itself. Beratung translates directly to "counselling", but in English, counselling is often used interchangeably with "therapy". In German, and particularly in Austria, there is a much clearer distinction: Beratung and Psychotherapie are separate professional fields, with different scopes of practice and different legal frameworks. So when I say "counselling", I am deliberately not referring to psychotherapy or mental health treatment.

TLDR

This may sound a little complicated, so concretely: the following topics can be secondary subjects in counselling sessions, but we cannot offer any treatment for them:

• Personality disorders (Borderline, Bipolar, Histrionic, Narcissistic, etc.)
• Depression
• Eating disorders
• Obsessive-compulsive disorders
• Addiction
• Trauma & Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Counselling can also support you with these topics, but we are not permitted to treat them.

Psychosocial counselling can support you with all kinds of internal and interpersonal topics:

• Personal development: Exploring, consolidating and putting your values into practice; building on strengths and transforming weaknesses
• Working on goals: Formulating goals; exploring the next steps; focusing; strengthening motivation
• Inner conflicts: Examining, trying out, changing and/or developing different positions; tolerating ambivalence; expanding your limits of tolerance
• Decision-making: Experimenting with possible scenarios; mapping out consequences in your environment; experiencing decisions as an act of self-empowerment
• Stress and burnout prevention: Relaxation techniques; recognising your own limits; developing greater body awareness
• Shaping relationships: Visualising social systems; reflecting on positions within relationships; family systems
• Loss and crisis: Saying goodbye; grief support; acknowledging and honouring all kinds of loss

In Austria, Life and Social Counselling is a regulated trade, and access to the profession requires, among other things, extensive training at accredited training institutions. In my case, this was a university programme through ARGE Bildungsmanagement in cooperation with Sigmund Freud University. The programme was officially titled "Counselling Sciences and Management of Social Systems". I completed the programme between 2020 and 2023, graduating with distinction. Since this university programme was a continuing education programme that also involved academic research, I am entitled to use the designation "Academic Life and Social Counsellor".

In addition to my training as a psychosocial counsellor, I am also a meditation & mindfulness teacher (WIFI Vienna, 2017) and have been working in the IT industry as a designer & programmer since 2010.

Our professional code requires us as Life and Social Counsellors to charge a standard industry rate in order to prevent wage dumping. However, there is room for reduced rates for people in financial need.

Don't hesitate to get in touch with me anyway, and we'll find a way for you to get the support you need.

Life and Social Counsellors are not bound to specific methods or schools in the way psychotherapists are. This leaves a lot of room for context and individual approaches, but it can also often result in confusion. Based on my training, I describe myself as a systemic counsellor — meaning I work according to approaches commonly known as "systemic family therapy".

The name is a little misleading, because family is not a constant central theme. What defines the systemic approach, however, is its particular way of looking at clients, the social contexts they are embedded in, and the relationships that emerge from them, including the relationship between counsellor and client. Systemic work focuses heavily on the individual client's experience and on how this experience is informed and influenced by the various social systems they are part of.

Systemic practitioners often distinguish between three significant strands within systemic practice, which share the same underlying attitudes and follow the same logic in their understanding of how change occurs, while operating at different levels: narrative, solution-focused, and hypnosystemic. Many colleagues feel more comfortable working on one or more of these levels than others, but in counselling sessions we often work across all of them simultaneously because one of the defining characteristics of the systemic approach is the diversity of its methods. Ultimately, the client decides which approach is right for them.

The final major characteristic of systemic practice is its dedicated focus on language and communication. Language cannot keep up with the complexity and ambiguity of thoughts and feelings — it is always reductive. However, how we reduce things when we choose words and construct sentences contains information about what is important and what is not. There is therefore a difference that makes a difference. Systemic work is consequently always informed by what can make a difference for the client.

TLDR

For you, in concrete terms, systemic counselling means that:

• You get asked lots of questions
• You often look for differences
• You can try out lots of creative methods
• You can talk about even very complicated things
• You can explicitly say what works for you and what doesn't
• You talk a lot about your relationships with yourself and with others

Psychosocial counselling is a structured conversation between trained counsellors and their clients, intended to support and assist them through complex problems and decision-making situations of an individual or interpersonal nature.

Our approaches leave plenty of room for individual and context-specific ways of working, but they are always grounded in findings from communication sciences, brief therapeutic approaches, and psychology. Our work is consistently focused on promoting health and preventing problems before they develop.