No crisis is required, and no diagnosis either. A fair number of people arrive with nothing they can point to, which is usually the thing worth looking at.
Short answer. No crisis is required, and no diagnosis either. People arrive because a week felt flat, or because they have been rehearsing the same conversation in their head for a month, or because they cannot say what is off but something is. That is a reasonable place to start from. If it turns out you do not need to be there, I will say so.
Almost everyone who asks me this has already decided the answer is no. They ask it the way you ask a question you are hoping to be talked out of.
Underneath it is a picture of what counselling is for, and in that picture it is for people in serious trouble. A breakdown. A bereavement. Something with a name. Against that, whatever is going on with you looks small, and taking up an hour with it looks close to indulgent.
I understand where the picture comes from. It is just not what most weeks in this work look like.
When someone tells me nothing is wrong, they are usually being accurate rather than evasive. The job is fine. The marriage is fine, or there isn't one and that is also fine. Nobody is ill. Money works.
And then, a little further in, something more specific turns up. They have not looked forward to anything in about eight months. They cannot remember the last time they said something true to another person. There is a low, constant sense of being slightly behind that does not go away on a holiday. Sundays have a shape they have started to dread.
None of that is a crisis. It is also not nothing.
The word people reach for is usually flat. Not sad, which they would have noticed and done something about. Flat: everything working and none of it landing.
Two reasons, and they run together.
The first is the permission problem. If you are functioning, and you look at what you imagine counselling to be for, you will conclude you have not earned it. So you wait for something bad enough to justify going. The trouble with that logic is where it leads. You end up hoping for a crisis so that you are allowed to ask for help, which is a strange thing to catch yourself doing.
The second is that being the person who copes is a role, and roles are hard to step out of. If you have spent fifteen years being the one who handles things, saying that you are not handling this is not a small sentence.
I would put it this way. Difficulty is not the qualification. If something has been sitting there for months, and the people around you have not been able to shift it, that is reason enough on its own.
Ordinary things, mostly.
A promotion that arrived and changed nothing. The last close friend leaving the city. A parent's diagnosis, and the strange guilt of noticing you are managing it rather than feeling it. A relationship that has gone quiet without anything happening. Wanting to leave a career that everyone agrees is a good career.
Sometimes it is only this: I have been fine for a long time and I do not want to be only fine any more.
It is a conversation. You talk, I listen properly, and I ask questions that are usually more specific than the ones you have been asking yourself. Over a few of those, patterns show up. Most people find they already knew a good deal of what surfaces, which is not a disappointment, it is how it tends to go.
It is not a diagnosis. I am a counsellor, not a doctor, and this is not a medical assessment.
It is not advice. If you want someone to tell you whether to leave the job, I am not going to be much use, and I will say so early.
It is not a project to make you into a better person. You are not the problem to be solved.
I would rather say this plainly than have you find out slowly.
If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, or you cannot sleep or eat for days at a stretch, or something has changed sharply in a way that frightens you, that is a psychiatrist or a doctor, not me, and it should not wait for a slot in someone's evening. Tele-MANAS is free and staffed around the clock on 14416.
If what you want is a plan for your career, a coach is a better fit and probably faster.
And if you have a specific, contained problem and one conversation sorts it, we will stop. I have no interest in keeping people longer than the work takes.
I cannot tell you that from here, and anyone who says they can from a page is selling something.
What I would say is that the question you started with is the wrong one. It is not whether you are struggling enough. It is whether this has been going on long enough that you have stopped expecting it to lift on its own. If you have, one conversation will tell you more than another six months of deciding will.
Do I need a reason to book a first conversation? No. "I do not know why I am here" is a completely workable place to begin, and it is more common than you would think.
Will I be told I have something? No. I am a counsellor and I do not diagnose. If I think you should see a psychiatrist, I will tell you that directly and help you work out who to see.
What if I go and have nothing to say? That happens, and it is my job rather than yours to make it workable. Silence in a first conversation is not a failure of the conversation.
How many sessions will I need? It depends, and I will not pretend otherwise. Some things take a handful. Some take longer. We will talk about it honestly rather than you finding out by accumulation.
Can I stop if it is not helping? Yes, at any point, and you do not owe me an explanation. If it is not working, I would rather know, because sometimes that is fixable and sometimes it means you need someone else.
Is it confidential? Yes, with the limits that apply to anyone doing this work, which I will go through with you at the start rather than leaving in a document you will not read.
Written by Satlaj Sachan, a counsellor in Bengaluru working Book a first conversation.