What’s the Difference Between Counselling and Psychotherapy?
One of the most common questions we hear from students and clients alike is:
“What exactly is the difference between counselling and psychotherapy?”
While the terms are often used interchangeably, especially in everyday conversation, they can refer to quite different scopes of practice. Understanding the distinction can be valuable for anyone seeking help or considering training in the field.
Counselling: Present-Focused, Issue-Based
Counselling is generally shorter-term and focused on specific life challenges. It may help someone navigate a difficult event, relationship issue, loss, or life transition. The goal is often to develop coping strategies, gain clarity and restore a sense of balance.
Although counselling can certainly extend over time, people often engage in it for a defined and focused period. Examples might include grief counselling following a bereavement, support during a relationship break-up or a referral from a medical practitioner as an alternative to mild antidepressants following a diagnosis of mild anxiety or low mood.
Counselling tends to stay in the here and now. It’s typically structured around helping the client find solutions or perspective in response to a particular concern, rather than delving too deeply into their past.
It’s often the entry point for people who wouldn’t necessarily describe themselves as having a mental health condition but who nonetheless want support, insight, or personal growth.
Psychotherapy: Depth Work and Inner Transformation
Psychotherapy, by contrast, often works at greater depth and over a longer time frame. It seeks to uncover unconscious patterns, past wounds, developmental dynamics, and core beliefs that shape a person’s experience of themselves and the world. As someone who has long traversed both fields, offering counselling and psychotherapy, I’ve noticed a pattern: the clients who attend psychotherapy often seem to arrive with the mindset that their journey may be longer-term or they really want to ‘work on themselves.’ There’s a different orientation, sometimes subtle, toward deeper transformation.
Where counselling may focus on how to feel better, psychotherapy often asks why we feel the way we do—and helps bring buried material into awareness so it can be transformed. Psychotherapy also tends to place more emphasis on the therapeutic relationship itself. In counselling, the focus may be more on reflective listening and empowering the client to arrive at their own insights. In psychotherapy, the relationship becomes part of the process, studied through the lenses of transference and countertransference. In some cases, entire sessions may be dedicated to exploring what is happening in the relational field between therapist and client.
Greater attention is also paid to how the therapy ends. Unlike some shorter counselling models that may conclude naturally or pragmatically, psychotherapy endings are typically anticipated, explored, and carefully processed over a number of sessions.
Training in psychotherapy generally takes longer. Students are usually expected to be in regular personal therapy over an extended period and to explore their own material in greater depth.
The Spectrum: One Can Lead to the Other
The truth is, there’s often an overlap, and many practitioners work fluidly between both. What begins as short-term counselling can evolve into psychotherapy as trust deepens and new layers emerge.
In fact, some of the richest therapeutic journeys happen when we don’t try to draw hard lines.
Take a Holistic Approach and Train in Both and More
Our Integrative Psychotherapy training at the College of Contemporary Therapy prepares students to work effectively across both spectrums—and far beyond. Today’s therapist needs to be versatile. Sometimes what begins as counselling for a clearly defined issue becomes a profound journey of inner transformation.
But the “more” matters too.
Our approach integrates multiple layers of human experience:
- The mental: including evidence-based tools such as CBT to help clients reframe thinking patterns.
- The somatic: drawing on body psychotherapy and somatic awareness to release trauma stored in the body.
- The energetic and spiritual: exploring deeper spiritual profiling, the dynamics of the energy field, archetypes, shadow work, and ultimately, non-dual awareness.
Today’s therapist needs to be versatile. Sometimes what begins as counselling for a clearly defined issue becomes a profound journey of inner transformation. That’s why we train practitioners not just in techniques, but in discernment—so they know how to meet the client where they are, and how to recognise when the soul is ready to go deeper.