Spiritual Therapist Durango or online in Colorado

When searching for a therapist in Durango or considering mental health support, you may come across the terms “therapy” and “counseling” used interchangeably. While they often overlap, there are subtle distinctions worth exploring to help you find the support that best fits your needs.

What’s the Difference Between Therapy and Counseling?

At its core, counseling typically refers to a process of talking things through with a professional who offers guidance, support, and strategies to navigate life challenges. Counselors often work with clients to address specific concerns, such as improving relationships, managing stress, or overcoming temporary setbacks. It’s worth noting that not all counselors require a license—there are many types of counselors in fields like education, career development, and life coaching.

Therapy, on the other hand, is more focused on healing. Therapy often involves deeper work to address mental, emotional, or even physical issues. In the mental health field, therapy includes various forms of treatment, such as psychotherapy, which focuses on improving mental well-being by exploring thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Therapy can also encompass physical or medical treatments, such as physical therapy for injuries or speech therapy for communication challenges.

In practice, when you’re seeking a Durango therapist, the terms counselor and therapist are often interchangeable within the mental health field. For example, while the state of Colorado may officially label some mental health professionals as counselors, their work often includes providing therapy in the form of psychotherapy.

The Similarity Between Therapy and Counseling

Ultimately, both therapy and counseling aim to help people lead healthier, more fulfilling lives. In the mental health field, whether you work with a counselor or a therapist, the focus will typically be on creating a supportive, nonjudgmental space to promote personal growth, emotional healing, and self-discovery.

So, if you’re looking for a therapist in Durango, the important thing is finding someone qualified and experienced in providing the type of support you need—whether they call it therapy, counseling, or both.

Transpersonal Therapy

Somatic Counseling

Spiritually-Integrated Counseling

Person-Centered Therapy

Deep down, all counseling is spiritual, but not all counselors acknowledge that. 1) Spiritual counseling integrates spiritual or religious aspects of your life and considers your spiritual well-being throughout the counseling process.

  The spiritual impact of counseling is tied to the transformation that happens during counseling, but usually, counseling that originates from the medical model doesn’t focus on that impact. 2) Spiritual counseling is intentional about helping you create conditions for deep transformation and healing.

  While most modern counseling is humanistic in that it focuses on the individual to some extent, that focus is on a spectrum. 3) Spiritual counseling is person-centered, intentionally nurturing a greater connection to your intuition and working to expand your sense of self.

Many people on a spiritual path, myself included, are afraid that counseling won’t make space for their spiritual wellness. This research (1) compared spiritually integrated counseling with conventional counseling. They were similar in effectiveness across the board, except for one area: spiritually integrated counseling increased spiritual wellness in participants above and beyond conventional counseling. 
(1) Captari, L. E., Hook, J. N., Hoyt, W. T., Davis, D. E., McElroy‐Heltzel, S. E., & Worthington, E. L. (2018). Integrating clients’ religion and spirituality within psychotherapy: A comprehensive meta‐analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 74(11), 1938–1951. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22681

Somatic counseling is body-based psychotherapy. For decades we’ve known that our thoughts, emotions, state of mind, and perceptions are closely interwoven with our physical body. A clear conceptual understanding of the relationship between our mind and body is just taking a bit longer to spread through our culture.

Think about it this way: how much does your mental state change when you get hangry? Or when you lose an hour of sleep to a neighbor’s dog? When we examine the myriad of subtle ways that our bodies influence our minds, we realize there can be no clear distinction between one and the other. We know that the body stores trauma and memory, our gut affects our cognition so much that some people call it our second brain, and something as simple as stretching can cause a dramatic release of emotion.

  Somatic counseling reconnects our awareness of emotions and thoughts with their corresponding bodily sensations. This integration expands our ability to navigate and interpret our intuition.